No, We Should Not Painlessly Kill Predators
It was not that long ago when Western society largely demonized and persecuted animal predators. As recently as 1965, bounty programs in the United States encouraged the killing of wolves and other large predators, offering rewards of $20 to $50 per pelt. In those days, predators were considered a nuisance to ranchers and competition to hunters. Prominent conservationists supported eradication efforts, and even ecologists at the time considered predators largely unimportant to stable ecosystem functioning.
Now the West recognizes the vital role predators play in nature. Predators serve as bulwarks against overconsumption and overpopulation, and their very presence can shape landscapes. The role of top-down control in shaping ecosystems is now widely recognized by ecology and conservationists now view saving such keystone species as vital to preserving threatened habitats. Decades of successful public outreach and education have even shifted societal attitudes towards predators from feared monsters to charismatic mascots of conservation.
But we are not so far removed from our past to fully escape it, and the pendulum can swing back just as fast. In some animal-rights circles, this reversal has already begun, and predators are again threatened by the morals of men.
In a 2020 essay published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, visiting faculty fellow at Princeton University Ben Bramble argues for the eradication of animal predators to spare prey from the “harms of predation.” Animals, Brambles argues, suffer not just from the harms of captivity, but also in the wild where they are subject to the anxiety and pain of being hunted and killed by predators. The solution, Bramble posits, is to painlessly kill predators (PKP).
“PKP could be justifiable given its massive benefits to prey,” writes Bramble. “While it has costs for predators, its benefits to prey far outweigh these. Not only is a painless death less bad for an animal than years of anxiety and a nightmarish death in the jaws of a predator, but for every predator killed, many prey would be saved.”
The idea of an idyllic post-predation utopia is not a new concept. Western philosophical thought, influenced largely by Christianity, has historically considered the violence in nature a natural evil the result of the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. Christian descriptions of a future paradise often allude to a time when nature will be set right again and “the wolf shall live with the lamb” as is prophesized in the Book of Isaiah.
Distaste for the horrors of predation consumption did not escape more secular authorities either. American zoologist J. Howard Moore in his 1907 manuscript The New Ethics labeled carnivores as “criminal” races whose “existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world.” Even Charles Darwin, as he formulated his theory of natural selection, could not reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with the existence of parasitoid wasps, writing in a letter to a minister:
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
But more contemporary voices such as Bramble go beyond expressing their distaste for predation and advocate for intervening against it.
“The argument for policing nature is simply the same argument that we use to stop the human killer in these alternative contexts,” writes Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University. In his essay Policing Nature, Cowen reasons that intervening to prevent human violence is not contingent on whether or not the killer is a moral agent, such as in the case of an insane criminal, and so it should be no different when the killer is an animal. “Carnivorous animals are aggressing against other animals and in principle they are no different from the insane human killer.”
Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, predicts that one day it should be possible to not only eliminate predation but also maintain ecological stability in their absence. This would be achieved, according to McMahan, by converting the biosphere into one which resembles island ecosystems where prey flourish at great sizes in the absence of predation pressure.
In The Moral Problem of Predation, McMahan even goes on to suggest that endangered predators, such as the Siberian tiger, should be permitted to go extinct since any ecological damage from their extinction would be negligible given their already diminished presence in the wild.
As we sit on the precipice of catastrophic climate change and the unprecedented loss of countless species, the very last thing we should be considering is allowing endangered predators go extinct.
Predation is a natural part of life and the consumption of other organisms is simply a fact for every organism save for plants, photosynthetic endosymbionts, and a few chemosynthetic critters dwelling in the deep-sea ocean vents. As the American writer and environmentalist Gary Snyder says on his poem Song of the Taste, “All of nature is a gift exchange, a potluck banquet, and there is no death that is not somebody’s food, no life that is not somebody’s death.”
These philosophers and animal rights activists are factually correct in their initial assessment of nature. The natural world can be incredibly cruel and unforgiving. Organisms around the world commit daily acts of violence in the struggle for survival. But attempts to impose morality on nature are just as misguided and dangerous as those which seek to derive it from nature. The dark legacies of social Darwinism and population eugenics speak for themselves in this matter.
The hopeful idea that one day humans will wield such ecological power as to fine-tune every ecosystem to operate in a stable fashion without predation is wishful thinking at best, and dangerous thinking at worst; relying on the same techno-optimism invoked by proponents of geo-engineering projects to innovate ourselves out of the current climate crisis. In both circumstances, there is an insistence on avoiding ecological truth and to casually handwave away the possibility for catastrophe should their techno-fixes fail.
Ultimately, I feel such arguments are a symptom of a larger ailment of alienation from nature and natural processes. Nature-deficit disorder, as coined by nature writer Richard Louv, is an increasing epidemic that no doubt affects how we interpret and, importantly, value the various acts of nature. To quote Louv, “We no longer assume a cultural core belief in the perfection of nature.” We assume a rather anthropocentric position that we know best as if this ecological drama has not been playing for millions of years just fine without human interlopers. We’re rather late to the story, in evolutionary terms, and it's rather bold for us to assume that we can write a better play.
While well-intentioned, the call to kill predators is one which should be answered with a firm and definitive, no.
