Where are the Vegan Conservationists?
by Michael Burrows
(Michael holds a PhD in public policy from Duke University, specializing in demography, environmental sociology, and quantitative methodology contact – michael.a.burrows@gmail.com)
The scientists, government officials, and activists that make up the fields of conservation and wildlife management govern many important aspects of our society’s relationship with the natural world – yet vegan ethics are virtually nowhere to be seen. 1st footnote There is much need for vegans to engage with our relationship with wild lands and the animals living on them, because the principles that vegans live by could push conservation in a new and more principled direction. By influencing them with the ethical principles that vegans live by, we can help advocate for an end to the needless slaughter that defines conservation and wildlife management throughout this country.
Conservation is driven by human interests
Anthropocentrism – that is, the idea that humans are more valuable than any other beings and that non-humans are primarily valuable in their ability to serve human interests – guides conservation and wildlife management decisions. The privileging of humans over other species comes as no surprise to most vegans, who are used to observing widespread dismissal of the well-being of other beings.
The anthropocentrism of modern conservation may surprise few vegans, but this fundamental paradox – that a field charged with protecting wildlife is mostly motivated by figuring out what it is worth to us and how to get the most value out of it – underpins our society’s relationship with the natural world, and is profoundly connected to the crisis we have inflicted on the biosphere. While exploitation of wild land and wild lives is nothing new to human society, in the United States these tendencies are articulated as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM), and the perspective is generally adopted by the many state and federal agencies responsible for protecting wildlife. The NAM centers the role of hunters, fishers, and trappers in governing our relationship to nature, with the connection between hunting and conservation presented without evidence or even much debate. Less than 4 percent of the U.S. population hunts, so a very small and well-organized group of people with very specific (and to vegans, contrary) interests is routinely empowered to make decisions about countless present and future lives.
The NAM also calls for scientific management of wildlife, and to many in the public the notion of ‘following the science’ is somewhat soothing. Sadly, calls for scientific management of wildlife tend to lead us in the same direction as entrusting conservation to hunters, fishers, and trappers. Even with the best intentions, the values held by scientists guide the questions that they ask, the techniques they use, and their interpretation of results (even though researchers tend to be blind to those biases). As a result, even a scientific approach will default to the interests and biases of humans, with the cost to non-humans rarely even accounted for, much less treated with any seriousness. By ignoring the values that go into making the science, we ensure that the violent status quo will remain unchallenged.
- There are distinctions between conservation and wildlife management, namely that conservation is inspired by the intrinsic value of ecological collectives (such as populations and ecosystems), while wildlife management is purely anthropocentric. For this piece, I choose to foreground conservation because the term is better known and because the two are so conflated in the U.S. context. See this discussion in Biological Conservation for more discussion about the two terms.
The dark side of modern conservation
So what has mainstream conservation brought us? At its worst, conservation has delivered countless variations of mass slaughter. The conservation world’s vision of sustainability plays out at the expense of coyotes in Maine, where under the auspices of maintaining a sustainable deer population (for hunters to exploit) and protecting domesticated animals used in animal agriculture (for humans to eat, and which coyotes rarely kill) the year round hunting of coyotes remains unchallenged. Inversely, the lack of regulations for killing coyotes is often justified by their populations perceived to be ‘fine’ or ‘abundant’ – as it was this year by Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. In defiance of basic science, Maine’s wildlife officials also advocate for trapping coyotes where guns are not allowed. The large land-owning conservation group The Nature Conservancy continues to support hunting six days per week, while the hunting lobby fights for seven. When a recent bill came up to ban canned hunting – the brutal practice of enclosing wildlife in fenced areas so that the pretense of escape from the hunt is completely avoided – wildlife management officials opposed the bill on irrelevant technicalities, and prominent conservation organizations provided no testimony in support.
All of these outcomes are underpinned by a very simple question – what can we humans get out of nature? This question might seem crass, so it’s often posed through the lens of neoclassical economic theory, which reduces the role of nature to “ecosystem services” (that is, any positive benefit that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people). Through this lens, concepts like maintaining a sustainable population might be deemed important, if doing so meets some set of human needs. Still, the individual lives within that population remain broadly ignorable, as long as the population itself continues at levels considered acceptable to human observers.
Wild lives at our service
More sympathetic is the human desire to be close to wild lives. Rick Mcintyre’s masterful documentation of the alpha wolves of Yellowstone follows the repopulation of the park with wolves, but he often justifies the project with the wish by many to simply hear wolves howl again at night, decades after their extermination by U.S. wildlife management authorities in 1926. Now, Yellowstone is considered one of the best places in the world to view wolves. Whether the forcible removal of wolf packs from their indigenous homes, and their subsequent relocation to an unfamiliar ecology, is a moral way to address this human desire was not broadly discussed within the conservation community. Certainly, no efforts were made at the time to assess whether doing so was a desire of the wolves, or indeed in the better interests of other animals that had come to fill their ecological niche after their 60-year absence.
Most in the conservation community celebrate the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction as a great conservation success story, with an emphasis on the many accompanying ecological benefits. But hunting around the edge of the park means risks to wolves outside the Yellowstone ecological island are great, and why would curious, adventurous, and territorial beings know about human administrative boundaries? Acclimation to Yellowstone tourists, too, means that wolves are not as wary of people as they should be given the prevalence of hunters, trappers, and motor vehicles; humans are responsible for almost one in five wolf deaths inside Yellowstone, and more than three in four deaths outside of the park. Is the cost to these wolves worth the benefit to us humans?
A similar story unfolds today in Colorado, where voters narrowly approved a ballot measure to reintroduce wolves. The desire to construct an ecological utopia for our pleasure is understandable, but human notions about what nature should look like are subject to our biases. When these biases can be evaluated, they are shown to be limited, shortsighted and ahistorical. Modern conservation has its roots in white supremacy, and while some have acknowledged the most glaring historical wrongdoing, the movement is driven forward today by similar prejudicial arrogance. With the well-being of so many other animals at stake, caution is warranted, and change is necessary.
Vegan ethics would save wild lives
Vegan principles offer powerful and interconnected insights to conservation. First, there is an implicit relationship between farmed animals and supporting wild lives. For example, agriculture – of which 80% of land is devoted to animal exploitation – drives historic rates of habitat loss and extinction; furthermore, animal agriculture has been broadly committed to the extermination of carnivores. Fighting to end the power of this industry and the raising of animals for human purposes will benefit both domesticated and wild lives. Second, conservation is oriented around concepts like population sustainability, ecosystems, and biodiversity, while vegans tend to be more concerned with individual lives. Conservationist concepts are also important in emphasizing the interconnectivity of individual lives, but the emphasis on the collective ignores that animals think, feel, and value life – facts that are scientifically demonstrated, but of little interest to the conservation community. Third, vegans are primarily motivated by ending animal suffering, of which harmful or lethal conservation interventions are an enormous source. At its very best, conservation entertains ideas of making wild animals suffer less as we shape their homes to our interests. As vegans, we must fight to inflict no suffering at all.
Toward vegan conservationism
The prevailing model of conservation has failed all but a few. Its disregard for nonhuman lives, less privileged human populations, and future generations has pushed our living world to the brink of collapse. Some emerging paradigms of conservation make considerable steps toward correcting for the historical failings of traditional conservationism, and their key principles offer structure to vegan conservationism.
Compassionate conservation foregrounds compassion toward nonhuman animals in all conservation decisions, primarily by extending personhood to all sentient beings, leading to such principles as “First Do No Harm” (borrowed from the Hippocratic oath) and “Peaceful Coexistence”. Compassionate conservation is a notable departure from traditional conservation in its increased consideration and recognition of individual animals, rather than only the ecosystems or collectives centered by traditional conservation.
Non-traditionalist critics have pointed out some shortcomings of compassionate conservation. For one thing, compassion itself, while necessary, is an insufficient value for determining behavior in the many different situations that emerge in conservation decision-making. Further, while it is clear that recognition of and justice for individual nonhumans is important for multispecies justice, it is not so obvious that concepts representing ‘ecological wholes’, such as ecosystems and collectives, need to be totally pushed aside.
Just preservation emphasizes respect and dignity for other species as well as the interrelationships between them. Going further than compassionate conservation, just preservation advocates for ethical impartiality between species (so, no categorical bias toward humans), and describes a mixed-moral community defined by responsibilities to others, individuals, and collectives. In placing human wellbeing alongside nonhuman wellbeing and cultivating explicit consideration for the future (of all species, rather than just our own), this approach offers vegans a valuable entry point into conservation.
What is to be done?
In spite of new ideas about conservation circulating, the traditional approach to conservation remains basically unchallenged. Non-action by vegans means continuing to abdicate the responsibility of mediating our relationship to other species to hunters, trappers, fishers and ranchers. What should vegan action in the realm of conservation look like?
First, vegans should engage on legislative matters related to conservation and wildlife management. The interests of hunters, trappers, fishers, and agricultural interests are extraordinarily organized, ensuring that the brutal status quo will always be well-represented. While some legislation receives considerable input from a public interested in mitigating animal suffering, much receives none at all. It is our responsibility as vegans to look beyond the food we (don’t) eat and the clothes we (don’t) wear, and advocate for creatures we may never come into contact with against those who generally wish to oppress and kill them. We can be opposed to anthropocentrism while reminding our representatives that, in the current context, our public lands belong to all of us, not just those who seek to instrumentalize the animals upon them.
Second, we must push conservation organizations to promote broadly ethical legislation, rather than promoting the narrow interests of their donors. When environmental nonprofits try to push for the wellbeing of one animal over another, they should be corrected. If we donate to groups that assume the right to decide over other animals’ lives, we should tell them why that approach is wrong. If they are not responsive to vegan values, we should not donate to them, instead finding organizations that do, or even establishing our own. Correspondingly, we should push nonprofits that are concerned with animal wellbeing to advocate for wild lives. Far too often, their advocacy stops with companion animals and victims of agriculture. For better and worse, nonprofits are responsive to donors, and if we donate to them we should engage with them and push them to act as ethically as possible.
Third and most central to our everyday lives, we must continually reexamine our own relationship with the living world and be sure that we are doing what we can to let other beings live in peace. Perhaps this means reevaluating whether putting bird feeders in our windows is a good idea, if doing so puts wild birds at risk of predation, collision, or disease, just so we can get a closer look at them. Or we might spend more time considering what we put in our garden when we try to grow our own food, if the production of those inputs disturbs wild spaces. We should also consider if how we are using space impacts other beings living in a place we mistakenly consider to be only ours, thanks to an anthropocentric legal property system that dismisses nonhuman claims to land in the same way as was done to indigenous people when and since Europeans arrived in North America.
Making these demands of ourselves will better position us to logically and morally confront this society’s unacceptable relationship with the natural world.