Attempts to Argue That Domesticated Animals Have Priority

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume VII, p. 62 of the PDF edition · English translation

22.1. The historical debt argument

There is a position which holds that we have a historical debt toward domesticated animals that we do not have toward wild animals, since they are victims of exploitation, which in turn began with domestication⁶⁶.

This claim is generally invoked in an attempt either to maintain that it is wrong to help wild animals or to deny the duty to help them. However, the claim cannot ground these conclusions, because if the historical debt criterion made sense, at most it would make helping domesticated animals a priority. Such a criterion would not serve to deny the duty to help wild animals (much less to prohibit helping them).

Moreover, even when used only as a criterion of priority, the historical debt criterion is problematic. For example, if priority depends on how serious the victims' situation is, then those victims toward whom we have no historical debt should have priority whenever they would be harmed to a greater degree if they were not prioritized.

Prioritizing domesticated animals could make sense if, because of exploitation and domestication, they were necessarily in a worse condition than wild animals. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, this is false. To think otherwise is to be unaware of what the typical life of animals in the wild is like.

The defender of the historical debt criterion could object that they are not arguing that the criterion is relevant because it indicates which animals are in a worse condition, but rather that it is relevant in itself: "our obligations depend on humanity's past acts, not on how well or badly off the animals we could help are." However, if so, then the historical debt criterion is motivated by personal purity, not by a real concern with improving the condition of individuals who are in a bad situation.

Moreover, the most reasonable explanation of why we would have a historical debt toward domesticated animals implies that we also have a historical debt toward wild animals. The most reasonable way to argue that we have a historical debt toward domesticated animals is the fact that we enjoy benefits that were only possible because of their domestication and exploitation. As a result of these activities, domesticated animals are today in an extremely bad situation.

However, if so, then we have exactly the same debt toward wild animals, given that the vast majority of the benefits we have enjoyed throughout history arose from interventions in nature to favor humans, and the fact that we did not intervene to benefit wild animals resulted in their being enormously harmed by natural processes. We chose to leave wild animals in the domain of those "subjected to the forces of nature": removing them from that category could equally be seen as a historical debt.

22.2. The degree of dependence argument

At other times it is said that wild animals have a certain independence that domesticated animals lack, which would make them less vulnerable: "they can fend for themselves!"⁶⁷.

Again, even if this claim were true, at most it could ground our giving priority to domesticated animals. It would not serve to deny the obligation to help wild animals, much less to prohibit helping them.

Moreover, someone's having a certain degree of independence indicates that they normally do not need help in certain circumstances, but not in all of them. For example, suppose that a normal adult human (the most commonly cited example of an independent individual) gets lost in the jungle, or is suffering from cancer. The fact that they do not need help in other situations does not imply that they do not need help in this situation.

The same is true of wild animals who have some degree of independence. There are situations (many, as we saw in Chapter 3) in which their independence is of no use whatsoever

in freeing themselves from what harms them. Moreover (as we also saw in Chapter 3), the vast majority of animals who suffer intensely and die prematurely in the wild are young animals and therefore lack the independence the argument presupposes.

The idea that wild animals are independent seems to arise from the fact that, as we saw in Chapter 3, when most people think of animals in the wild, they tend to think of animals who are not representative of typical life in the wild: they think of large, adult animals, who are a tiny minority of the animals in the wild.

Thus, contrary to what the objection assumes, the degree of dependence criterion would give us extra reasons to try to investigate ways of helping wild animals.