1. Moral considerability; 2. Speciesism; 3. Wild animal suffering; 4. Perversity and futility; 5. Jeopardy; 6. Relationality; 7. Priority; 8. Tractability.
Most people believe we should help others in need; this book argues we should also help starving, wounded and sick wild animals.
Catia Faria is Assistant Professor of Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid and a founding member of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on wild animal suffering.
'Animal Ethics in the Wild makes a powerful case for helping
wild animals. It also provides the most comprehensive treatment to
date of the incredibly important, and yet incredibly neglected,
problem of wild animal suffering. This book is essential reading
for anyone interested in combating speciesism.' Kyle Johannsen,
Trent University
'Catia Faria has for some years been a pioneer in the effort to
make both moral philosophers and members of the wider public think
seriously about the appalling suffering that many billions of
animals endure in the wild every day. In this book, she states the
case for beneficent human intervention and then meticulously
analyses and rebuts a large variety of objections that have been or
might be made to her proposal. This book is thus a carefully argued
and timely discussion of a highly serious moral problem that
remains tragically underappreciated.' Jeff McMahan, Sekyra and
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford
'Catia Faria does several important things in Animal Ethics in
the Wild. First, she provides a detailed yet accessible account of
commonly deployed moral arguments for protecting animals from harm,
and then shows why those arguments also apply to free-living or
wild animals. Further, Faria encourages people - like me - to think
more carefully about who our ethical values applies to, and then to
rethink what our ethical commitment to wild animals requires of us.
This book has the power to change readers' behaviour as its
implications are at once radical and simultaneously self-evidently
logical.' Siobhan O'Sullivan, UNSW Sydney
'Catia Faria's book develops a powerful, thought-provoking and
comprehensive defence of the controversial argument that there's an
obligation to help suffering wild animals, whatever the cause of
their suffering. Faria makes an important intervention into current
ethical debates about animals, and her book is strongly recommended
for scholars of animal and environmental ethics.' Clare Palmer,
Texas A&M University
'This book is devoted to an ethical issue that has the
particularity of being largely neglected by moral philosophers,
even though it concerns those individuals who are the most numerous
and who suffer the most. Its author succeeds in completely
reversing the usual burden of proof: those who, after reading the
book, wish to continue denying our moral duty to reduce the
suffering of animals living in the wild will have to find a mistake
in Catia Faria's simple, effective, and rigorous demonstration to
the contrary. No doubt a little shaken by this read, the rest of us
will most likely see these ideas settle in slowly. As our immediate
reaction wears off, our perplexity will likely give way to
acquiescing to the author's very ambitious yet seemingly
inescapable conclusions.' Valéry Giroux, Associate director of the
Centre de Recherche en Éthique (CRE), University of Montreal
'Brilliant and eloquent. Animal Ethics in the Wild is a
strong and firmly grounded call to us all to consider the need for
helping animals in nature. Catia Faria makes an extremely
compelling case for the reasons we have to intervene in nature to
reduce animal suffering, while she thoroughly dismantles the major
anti-interventionists arguments. A definitive work. A major
contribution to animal defence from a superbly lucid thinker.'
Núria Almiron, Co-director of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics
'Impeccably analytical and elegantly structured around Albert
Hirschman's distinction between appeals to futility, jeopardy, and
perversity, I know of no more thorough defense of intervening in
nature to reduce animal suffering than
Catia Faria's lucid book.' Paula Casal, ICREA Research
Professor, Pompeu Fabra University
'Faria has written a wonderfully clear, rigorous and compelling
book in defence of intervening to alleviate wild animal
suffering. This is the book that everyone interested in wild animal
ethics must read. And it is also the book with which those seeking
to defend the widespread intuition to 'leave nature alone' must
grapple.' Alasdair Cochrane, University of Sheffield
'From now on, the starting point of discussions of the suffering of
wild animals, and of what we should do about that suffering, will
be Catia Faria's superb account of these issues in Animal Ethics in
the Wild.' Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and Professor
of Bioethics, Princeton University
'In recent years, interest in wild animal suffering has increased
significantly, but long before that Catia Faria was already a
pioneer on this topic. Her long-awaited book, Animal Ethics in the
Wild, is a groundbreaking contribution that makes a compelling case
for why this is a very important, yet often overlooked, problem.
The book explores in careful detail the normative underpinnings of
our reasons for helping wild animals to prevent the natural harms
they suffer. I hope this book will be widely read, as anyone
interested in what we owe animals would benefit greatly from it.'
Oscar Horta, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Santiago
de Compostela
'… this is a thorough and wide-ranging look at a topic which
deserves far more attention, and I would recommend [the book] to
anyone who is skeptical of the philosophical basis of the
pro-interventionist argument or who wants to engage with this topic
in detail.' Tristan David Katz, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
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