On the Suffering of Animals in Nature: Legal Barriers and the Moral Duty to Intervene

Journal of Animal Ethics 7 (1):63-77 (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Human beings have a moral duty to intervene to prevent or to mitigate the suffering of free-living animals. This article focuses on that duty, particularly as it exists when an animal asks for help and when animals who need help are within the zone of a person’s ability and willingness to help. As such, people should be free to help if they choose to do so, unencumbered by legal restrictions that outlaw such conduct. However, federal and state laws in the United States remain an obstacle, because they designate some activities that are necessary to help free-living animals as unlawful. Laws should not interfere with human beings’ benign interactions with nature and, in particular, people should be legally permitted to help free-living animals. People should actually assist the individual animals who want or need help, rather than trading individual assistance in favor of ecosystem “management,” policy concerns that favor expediency and budget limitations, or any other tangential issues.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 102,394

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-03-16

Downloads
38 (#608,911)

6 months
10 (#394,314)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Animals, predators, the right to life, and the duty to save lives.Aaron Simmons - 2009 - Ethics and the Environment 14 (1):pp. 15-27.

Add more references