ABSTRACT
This chapter defends the claim that wild animal suffering (WAS) entails a collective duty to intervene in nature. In response to Clare Palmer’s claim that because we lack a special relationship with wild animals, we also lack positive duties to them, I note that only duties of care, and not duties of beneficence, are contingent upon special relationships. In response to Tom Regan’s claim that we lack duties of beneficence to wild animals because wild animals are competent to manage the dangers they face, I argue that most wild animal individuals are not competent, and that competence only undermines liberty-restricting interventions. I finish the chapter by arguing that pro-interventionists have good reason to focus on considerations of beneficence, rather than on distributive justice or rectificatory justice. Beneficence is a better basis than distributive justice for building democratic support for intervention, and rectificatory justice can only justify rescuing animals who won’t predictably cause significant harm.
