Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Animal Rights and the Problem of r-Strategists

  • Published:
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Wild animal reproduction poses an important moral problem for animal rights theorists. Many wild animals give birth to large numbers of uncared-for offspring, and thus child mortality rates are far higher in nature than they are among human beings. In light of this reproductive strategy – traditionally referred to as the ‘r-strategy’ – does concern for the interests of wild animals require us to intervene in nature? In this paper, I argue that animal rights theorists should embrace fallibility-constrained interventionism: the view that intervention in nature is desirable but should be constrained by our ignorance of the inner workings of ecosystems. Though authors sometimes assume that large-scale intervention requires turning nature into an enormous zoo, I suggest an alternative. With sufficient research, a new form of gene editing called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) promises to one day give us the capacity to intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. It should be noted that I use the term “animal rights theory” fairly broadly in this paper. My use of it includes, for example, the utilitarian view that animals (and humans) have moral status but not inviolable rights. In fact, my own view is that animals have rights, but not inviolable rights, as both their rights and the rights of humans may sometimes be overridden for the sake of beneficence.

  2. It is important to note that we owe certain duties of assistance even to distant strangers. According to Clare Palmer, we owe positive obligations to domesticated but not wild animals because we have no special relationship with the latter (Palmer 2010, chapter 5; Palmer 2015). Her argument fails because it assumes that duties of assistance are entirely contingent upon special relationships (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 162; Faria 2015).

  3. The difference between wild and domesticated animals is a familiar one, but ‘liminal animals’ is a relatively new category in the AR literature. Liminal animals are undomesticated animals that, unlike wild animals, live in and around human communities in order to take advantage of the opportunities they present for food and shelter. Examples include squirrels, pigeons, raccoons, etc. (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 62–69).

  4. Technically speaking, CRISPR just refers to a structural feature present in the genomes of different bacteria. The actual gene editing is done by an associated enzyme called Cas9 in combination with a guide RNA molecule that targets the desired part of the genome to be modified. Nevertheless, the acronym ‘CRISPR’ is now typically used to refer to this new form of gene editing (Doudna and Charpentier 2014, 1 and 3). For an informative and accessible article about CRISPR, see Ledford 2015b.

  5. Relevant circumstances might include such diverse things as, for example, whether or not the duty bearer has a personal history with the being to whom the duty is owed, the availability of financial resources, the physical abilities of the parties, etc. For examples of the kind of analogical reasoning I describe, see my references to Cowen 2003 and Simmons 2009 in footnote 7. See also Palmer 2010 and Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011. Much of what Palmer, and Donaldson and Kymlicka, conclude about our obligations to animals in different relational contexts is argued for on the basis of human analogues.

  6. There are some relevant disanalogies between parental duties and our duties to domesticated animals. The relationship between parent and child is a personal one, and the relevant duty is owed by one individual to another. Though the relationship between a breeder and the animals she breeds is closely analogous, our relationship with the class of domesticated animals is impersonal, and the relevant duties are collective. Palmer is aware of the difficulties with her analogy, however. For her thoughts on the matter and on related issues, see Palmer 2010, 95 and chapter 6. For an alternative analogy between domesticated animals and human slaves, see Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 74 and 79–80.

  7. I discuss a couple of such escape efforts in this section, one of which invokes our epistemic limitations, the other of which claims that even ecologically safe intervention, were it feasible, is contrary to wild animals’ flourishing. According to a third response, we aren’t required to rescue prey because predators are not agents and are thus not responsible for their own actions (Regan 1983, 357). I think this response fails because even if we accept the controversial claim that animals are merely patients, a threat’s lack of agency does not mean that the one who is threatened has no claim to assistance. For example, we’re presumably required to save a person who’s threatened by a boulder or a tornado in the event that we could do so without endangering ourselves (Cowen 2003, 176; Simmons 2009, 19–20). For a discussion of animals’ varying capacity for agency, see Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 65–66, 108–122, and 175–177.

  8. Fallibility-constrained interventionism is best understood as a claim about the desirability of ecologically safe intervention in the wild, and desirability claims are different from action-guiding claims (Cohen 2008, 250–254; Cohen 2009, 46–52; Gilabert 2011, 56 and 59–63). Though plausible action-guiding claims must also be feasible, desirability claims are hypothetical: they’re claims about what we should do in the event that it were feasible. As such, a desirability claim remains true even when the relevant action is infeasible: the claim “If action X was feasible, then person Y should perform it” is true even if person Y cannot feasibly perform action X. Since it is specifically a desirability claim, the plausibility of fallibility-constrained interventionism is therefore unaffected by the fact that, to a large extent, it is presently infeasible to intervene in nature without risking ecological disaster. Fallibility-constrained interventionism merely states that (a) we should intervene if we could safely do so, and (b) that the truth of (a) implies that we have reason to bring about a state of affairs from which safe intervention is feasible.

  9. Additional exceptions were published in Faria and Paez 2015. See, for example, Cunha 2015 and Tomasik 2015.

  10. It should be noted that my use of the terms ‘K-strategist’ and ‘r-strategist’ does not mean I endorse the theory with which they are associated. The predictions that theory makes about evolved traits have often proven false, but the classificatory terminology it employs is still helpful and in common use. It should also be noted that though using the terms ‘K-strategist’ and ‘r-strategist’ in a classificatory manner suggests a dichotomy, it’s more accurate to think of them as opposite points on a spectrum: some animals are clearly K-strategists, some are clearly r-strategists, but many also lie somewhere in between. Many thanks to Oscar Horta and to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to the importance of qualifying my use of these terms. For a helpful secondary source concerning the r and K-strategies, see Jeschke et al. 2008.

  11. For physical information about the wall lizards in their study, see Barbault and Mou 1988, 41.

  12. For papers arguing that most wild animals experience more suffering in their lives than enjoyment, see, for example, Horta 2010, 2013, 2015; and Tomasik 2015. For a prominent paper that suggests this conclusion on primarily theoretical grounds, see Ng 1995, especially 269–72 and appendix A. I owe thanks to Sue Donaldson and Howard Nye for comments that drew my attention to the importance of emphasizing the combined significance of the pain and prematurity associated with r-strategists' deaths. In combination, pain and prematurity suggest that most r-strategists either fail to live flourishing lives or do not have lives worth living.

  13. For his discussion of considered judgments and their role in moral theory, see Rawls’s comments about ‘reflective equilibrium’ in Rawls 1971, 19–21 and 46–51.

  14. See footnote 4.

  15. For a sampling of studies that have used CRISPR to edit genes in different species, see Bassett et al. 2013; Cho et al. 2013; DiCarlo et al. 2013; and Friedland et al. 2013.

  16. The idea of dispersing a genetically engineered trait through gene drive has been around for a while. See Burt 2003.

  17. For the types of gene drive that occur in nature, see Esvelt et al. 2014, 2–3.

  18. For studies that have successfully used CRISPR to conduct gene drives, see Gantz and Bier 2015; Gantz et al. 2015; and Hammond et al. 2016.

  19. For a general discussion of genetic methods for controlling mosquito populations, see Alphey 2014.

  20. For a discussion of various ways CRISPR could be used to intervene in nature, some of which are morally objectionable, see Charo and Greely 2015.

  21. See Esvelt’s discussion of ‘suppression drives’ in Esvelt et al. 2014, 3.

  22. See the products listed at, for example, Vegan cats 2016.

  23. For nutritional information about feeding cats a vegan diet, see Peden 1999.

  24. For information about the use of genetic technology for nutritional enhancement, see Beyer 2010.

  25. It’s worth noting that it would be necessary to induce carnivores to eat the plants we develop. It may be possible to design the plants so that carnivores would be inclined to eat them, .e.g., make the plants smell and taste similar to meat. If this can’t be done, however, then supplementary drives that genetically modify carnivore populations would be required to change their eating habits. I owe thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this complication.

  26. I owe thanks to Oscar Horta for prompting me to address this worry.

  27. Many thanks to Will Kymlicka for prompting me to address the harms of genetic experimentation.

References

Download references

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Queen’s University’s “Justice League” research group, the 2015 World Congress of the IVR, the 60th Annual Congress of the Canadian Philosophical Association, and the North American Society for Social Philosophy’s 33rd International Social Philosophy Conference. I’m greatful to the members of my audiences for their comments; as well as to Sue Donaldson, Oscar Horta, Will Kymlicka, and three anonymous reviewers from Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for written comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Department of Philosophy, Saint Mary’s University, 923 Robie St., Halifax, NS, B3H 3C3, Canada

    Kyle Johannsen

Authors
  1. Kyle Johannsen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kyle Johannsen.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Johannsen, K. Animal Rights and the Problem of r-Strategists. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 333–345 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9774-x

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9774-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation