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The nonprofit organization Animal Ethics also researches wild animal suffering and advocates on behalf of wild animals, among other populations. [132] Rethink Priorities is a research organization which, among other topics, has conducted research on wild animal suffering, particularly around invertebrate sentience and invertebrate welfare. [133 ...
The idea that animals might not experience pain or suffering as humans do traces back at least to the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, who argued that animals lack consciousness. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] Researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain, and veterinarians trained in the U.S. before ...
The book explores wild animal suffering as a moral issue and argues that there is a moral obligation to intervene in nature to alleviate this. It begins by establishing two main assumptions: suffering is bad, and if we can prevent or reduce suffering without causing greater harm and without jeopardizing other important values, we have an ethical obligation to do so.
Wild animal suffering, as a result of disease, has been drawn attention to by some authors, [21] who argue that we should alleviate this form of suffering through vaccination programs. [22] [23] Such programs are also deemed beneficial for reducing the exposure of humans and domestic animals to disease and for species conservation. [24]
Johannsen starts by examining the question of what is good about nature. He puts forward a number of arguments for why wild animals generally do not live good lives, such as the dominance of reproductive strategies which mean that large numbers of offspring are born, of which the great majority experience suffering and die before reaching adulthood.
Animals in the wild appear to be relatively free from eating disorders although their body composition fluctuates depending on seasonal and reproductive cycles. However, domesticated animals including farm, laboratory, and pet animals are prone to disorders. Evolutionary fitness drives feeding behavior in wild animals. The expectation is that ...
Injury in animals is damage to the body caused by wounding, change in pressure, heat or cold, chemical substances, venoms and biotoxins. Injury prompts an inflammatory response in many taxa of animals ; this prompts wound healing , which may be rapid, as in the Cnidaria .
In this way, animals learn from the consequence of their own actions, i.e. they use an internal predictor. Operant responses indicate a voluntary act; the animal exerts control over the frequency or intensity of its responses, making these distinct from reflexes and complex fixed action patterns.