Here is a scene I recall from a wildlife documentary. It involved two groups of chimpanzees living side by side in Africa which are sometimes drawn into conflict. Every now and again a chimp is attacked by the other group and injured or even killed. On one occasion, a female chimpanzee unluckily became separated from her tribe and was targeted by the other clan. A number of chimps began to track her down through the jungle in an apparently coordinated hunting party as she ran for her life in panic and terror. But the assailants were too fast and too well organized, and the female was fatally wounded by their savage attack.
The viewer of this footage may ask the question: assuming the absence of serious personal risk, should the documentary makers have intervened to save her, perhaps by distracting the pursuers and giving her the chance to get back to her group? For many people the answer to this will be that obviously they should not. For, it may be said, these are wild and free-living animals, and the people making the film are merely observers of what happens naturally in the wild.
Is this right? And, moreover, is it true that we should never intervene to assist free-living animals? There is a larger question here of what right and what responsibility we humans have to alter the lives of naturally occurring animal populations. For example, should we intervene when a group of wild animals suffer from prolonged drought or lack of food brought about by natural changes in the environment?
Let us consider what may lie behind the thought that we have neither the right nor the responsibility to get involved; that we should assume the role of observers, not actors. One obvious suggestion is that intervention may cause more harm than good to wild creatures. For instance, providing food to one subset of animals may damage the predator-prey balance and so have complex and unpredictable effects throughout the ecosystem. This is surely one of the great lessons to have emerged from biology and from human experience. There are innumerable cases of environmental stuff-ups created by our ignorance.
Nonetheless, this important lesson does not imply that we may never intervene. Can we say that giving the female chimpanzee the opportunity to escape will upset the “balance of nature”? After all, it was purely through bad luck that she became separated from her tribe and that she was unable to re-join them. Moreover, the relationship between her and her pursuers was not like, say, the relationship between a cheetah and a gazelle. Perhaps, then, her death was quite unnecessary for the health of the two ape populations.
But even if that is proved false, there are surely many other cases in which intervention would do no harm and may even help. Would such action, however, risk interfering with the process of evolution? Presumably, it is impossible to rule that out. Yet if any intervention preserved the integrity and balance of animal populations and ecosystems, would it matter if human beings influenced unseen evolutionary pathways? Aren’t we already doing this?
I suspect the feeling some people have that we should not intercede on behalf of animals will persist despite these points. The thought that it is improper to be other than spectators upon the wild is a strong one. Perhaps there is also a deep, if ungrounded, sense that stepping in must be harmful to the animals, or that there is an absolute dividing line between us and them that makes intervention somehow unnatural.
Some may also feel that we have no responsibility to render assistance to free-living animals. Indeed, it has been suggested that some recent ethical positions on animals discredit themselves by implying we ought to help free-living animals in trouble.
The environmental philosopher Professor Freya Mathews suggests that many conservationists are opposed to, say, the artificial feeding of wildlife for deep reasons associated with the nature of wildness itself. Unlike domestic species, wild animals live their own lives and make their own choices. They are not our property or our companions. Mathews says that to “acknowledge the moral sovereignty of wildlife is to concede that they are entitled to their own ecological estates”. The world belongs to them as much as it does to us.
However, humankind has inflicted great harm upon the earth and its species. And this harm is only set to worsen with the coming of profound anthropogenic changes in climate. So as, for example, polar bears start to starve in the Arctic, some conservationists are reluctantly suggesting that we provide supplemental feeding to them. This could indeed modify the whole way of life of polar bears, who would increasingly come into contact with human beings and who would not hunt in their normal fashion.
Supposing such a scenario happens across other parts of the animal kingdom, Mathews says, the relationship we have with the wild will be very different. It will go well beyond feeding rosellas and rescuing them when they are attacked by cats or crash into windows. It would mean that we treat free-living, wild animals as simultaneously independent and, where necessary, deserving of our help and assistance. In such a world, perhaps we will be more inclined to save the chimpanzee who was in serious trouble.
SIMON COGHLAN