The Charge of Creating Dependency

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 32 of the PDF edition · English translation

There is an objection to the proposal to help wild animals that holds that helping them would make them dependent on human care and would take away their ability to survive.

This objection does not apply to a large part (perhaps most) of the proposal to prevent or minimize natural harms. For example, it does not apply to any program aimed at reducing the number of births (such as sterilization and research into which kinds of elements in the environment result in lower birth rates), nor to the proposal to suspend the environmentalist and anthropocentric interventions that indirectly contribute to natural processes maximizing suffering and deaths.

Even in the case of providing food, water, medicines, vaccines, and treatments, this does not necessarily take away animals' ability to survive. For example, let us imagine that some adult birds who are used to foraging for their food now find themselves in conditions of scarcity. Someone, noticing this situation, constantly provides them with birdseed. This does not make the animals lose the ability they have already acquired, since it does not make them lose their memory. It is not helping, in this case of scarcity, that would result in the animals no longer being able to exercise their ability to forage, since they would die of starvation.

What the objection assumes is that we must choose between the following two options: (1) either the animals have their well-being increased now by receiving help, but have it decreased in the long run by losing the ability to survive; (2) or the animals have their well-being decreased now by not receiving help, but have it increased in the long run by retaining the ability to survive.

However, helping them does not make them lose the ability to survive if they have already acquired it, nor does it prevent them from acquiring it. That is, helping increases their well-being in the short term and increases the possibility of their continuing to have well-being in the long term, without decreasing it. Not helping them decreases their well-being in the short term and very probably decreases it in the long term (or even guarantees that there will be no well-being at all in the long term, since it very probably means their deaths).

Let us suppose that helping animals did make them dependent on human care. It would make sense to hold that, from an anthropocentric point of view, the best thing to do is not to help (helping would create extra work for humans that would not exist if the animals were left to die). But from the point of view of the animals who could be helped, is it really better for them to remain independent, suffer more, and die soon? To defend such a conclusion, one would have to claim that if the animals were aware of everything at stake and had the capacity to deliberate about what is best for themselves, they would prefer to suffer intensely and die just to remain independent. We can see that this is false from the human case itself: those who have the capacity to deliberate about these things prefer to receive help rather than be left to suffer intensely and die²⁵.