Species justice and harm to animals - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 126

intervention, is what if any levels of management ought to be engaged
in? The absolutist position is that non-intervention, full stop, should
be the name of the game.
The animal rights position does not mean releasing our
domesticated nonhumans to run wild in the street. If we
took animals seriously and recognized our obligation not
to treat them as things, then we would stop producing and
facilitating the production of domestic animals altogether.
We would care for the ones whom we have here and now,
but we would stop breeding more for human consumption.
And with respect to nondomesticated nonhumans, we
would simply leave them alone. (Francione, 2008: 13)
More realistic and situationally relevant appraisals, however, view
intervention as a matter of contingency and 'doing the right thing'
within specific social and ecological contexts (see Anderson, 2004).
In some cases, for example, it is argued that non-interference or
hands-off management should be strictly adhered to, from the point
of view of environmental ethics:
Animals live in the wild, subject to natural selection, and the
integrity of the species is a result of these selective pressures.
To intervene artificially is not to produce any benefit for
the good of the kind, although it may benefit an individual
bison or whale. (Rolston, 2010: 604)
This ethic may shift in cases where wild animals are affected by human-
induced changes. It can change as well where an endangered species is
involved: 'Duties to wildlife are not simply at the level of individuals;
the ethic is that one ought to rescue individual animals in trouble
where they are the last tokens of a type' (Rolston, 2010: 605). In general
though it is expected that individual animals living in the wild 'do not
have a moral right to our direct protection and provision, even if they
need it to survive', nor do they have a right to our assistance to protect
them against animal predation (Anderson, 2004: 284).
The rescue and protection of endangered species involves new
types of ethical decisions and complex issues relating to individual
and species harm.
Wolves have recently been reintroduced to Yellowstone
National Park, having been exterminated there early [last]