ABSTRACT
My book’s main conclusion is that we have a collective obligation to provide wild animals with large-scale, humanitarian assistance. Since large-scale assistance isn’t currently being provided, though, fulfilling our collective obligation will first require advocating for, supporting, and/or encouraging the implementation of an assistance program. In this chapter, I argue that in light of Peter Singer’s work on beneficence, it’s clear that we each have an individual duty to devote some of our resources to beneficence-related causes, wild animal suffering (WAS) included. Unlike Singer, however, I argue that we’re only morally required to make insignificant sacrifices. Though addressing WAS seems to require diverting advocacy-related resources away from traditional animal rights causes, I argue that it’s often unnecessary to choose between them. The reason is that there are many courses of action that manage to simultaneously address both WAS and traditional causes. I finish the chapter by arguing that illegal animal rights advocacy, though perhaps permissible in principle, is normally unjustified in practice, as legal animal rights advocacy is strategically superior.
