As the term "suffering" indicates, concern about the harm suffered by animals has to do with what affects their well-being. It is therefore different from an interesting conservation. That is, it is not about how species, populations, or ecosystems can be affected, because species and ecosystems are not themselves sentient individuals with subjective feelings.
Wild animal suffering is about how the well-being of individual animals can be negatively affected. Moreover, animals can be harmed in another way, which is by dying. Given this, even if rigorously speaking the term "wild animal suffering" is just about the animals suffering, It can also be used in the broader sense that includes not only suffering but also the harm of death.
There are different kinds of factors that can negatively affect animals living outside of human control. To simplify things, they can be divided into three main groups: First, directly anthropogenic harms are the ones caused by human beings that are the direct results of specific actions, either intentional or unintentional. Examples of intentional direct harm are fishing and hunting.
Another example is the intentional eradication of certain animals. This may be for economic reasons, such as when they are killed because of their negative impact on agriculture. It can also be for conservationist purposes, as when animals are killed because of their impact on other species.
Examples of unintentional direct harm are when animals are injured or killed by harvesting machines or by being run over by vehicles. Second, indirect anthropogenic harms are the harms that result from human action, but are not the direct result concrete actions. There may be different types of these harms.
They range from the harms caused by lost fishing nets to harms to animals due to extreme weather events from human caused changes to the climate. And finally, natural harms are harmed suffered by animals that take place without any human action being involved. Examples of these are harms from starvation, weather events, accidents, conflicts between animals and natural disasters.
The term "wild animal suffering" is sometimes understood to mean all kinds of harms suffered by wild animals. This includes those that are anthropogenic and those that are natural. It is useful to note here that animal defenders have often had a strong focus on anthropogenic harms, especially direct ones, suffered by both animals that have been domesticated and by wild ones.
The harms that are either completely or partly natural have not been considered that much. As a result, the term wild animal suffering has also been used in a more specific way to name all those harms suffered by animals outside human direct control that have some sort of natural component. In this more specific meaning, the term "wild animal suffering" would also include harms resulting from indirectly anthropogenic effects that are more diffuse.
An example is when animals died for natural reasons in a new ecosystem created by humans, such as a planted forest. Reasons for concern about the natural harms suffered by animals is not ultimately different from those informing the defense of animals harmed by human action. The motivation is very simple: we want animals to have good lives that are as good as possible free from suffering and premature death.
The point is that all the harm suffered by animals matter, not just directly anthropogenic ones, but also indirectly anthropogenic and natural ones. As we can see, there aren't strict borders between the three different types. Moreover, there can be combinations of the three types, especially of indirect and natural ones.
Animals can suffer harms that are partly natural and partly indirectly anthropogenic. Suppose, for example, that a new disease is introduced into the forest indirectly through human action and that some animals die from it. If the animals who live in that place contract the human-introduced disease, then that harm is indirectly anthropogenic, though It is also partly natural, because the disease spreads through the population through natural patterns.
Harms of this combined kind could be very common, because humans have changed most of the ecosystems existing on Earth. In fact because of human-caused changes to the climate, It is likely that there is no longer a single ecosystem unaltered by human activities, with the possible exception of some in the deep ocean and some other remote zones. In addition to this, it is estimated that more than a third of the world's land surface is being used for agricultural purposes.
Also around 1/4 of the total land is forests, of which there are large areas that have been planted partially or totally by humans, especially in temperate zones. Primeval forests, which are not planted and have developed with very little human Interaction are a minority, a very small percentage of for example in Europe. Yet, even these primeval ecosystems have been changed because of human activities affecting the climate.
This means that there is no longer a clear distinction between strictly natural harms and partly natural, partly anthropogenic harms to animals. This is also why, strictly speaking, wild animals living in all of these areas could be considered to some extent under human control, because human action can modify the places where they live and the conditions in which they live. In order to distinguish the animals we are concerned with here, we need to point out that they live outside direct human control.
Something else that should be clarified about the term "wild animals suffering" is the meaning of "wild animals". We might think wild animals are simply those that typically live in the wild. But this is inaccurate.
The same animals living in those areas can be found in other places. Also, the term "wild" can be confusing. Properly speaking, it means areas or ecosystems untouched, or only affected in minor ways by human beings.
Sometimes it is understood to mean all areas that don't have significant human presence or activity, including, for example, forests managed by humans. But the term wild animal suffering is not meant to include only animals living in those places. Many animals that most people consider "wild" live outside direct human control, in areas devoted to agriculture or animal farming.
They can also be found in urban, suburban, and industrial areas. Many types of vertebrates, like mammals, reptiles, birds, some large vertebrates, and many invertebrates live in those places. They are often directly harmed by human actions.
But they also suffer because of how their ecosystems affect their lives. Because of this, they can also be included within the definition. There are also some animals who live outside human control but are not typically classified as wild, such as animals who are considered "feral".
However, the distinction between "feral" and "wild" animal is not relevant from the point of view of their suffering. They are harmed in similar ways because of the challenges they must face. Accordingly under the term "wild animal suffering" we can certainly include concern for feral animals.
We can therefore see that the term "wild animals" in "wild animal suffering" denotes all animals living outside human control. "Wild animal" is just a linguistic shortcut that is used for simplicity. But we have to remember that it covers not only the animals living in the wild or semi-wild areas, but also feral animals and animals living in urban environments.
A common way to use the term "wild animal" is to refer to animals who do not belong to species that have been domesticated, in other words, selectively bred for many generations by humans, like dogs and chickens. There are animals who are wild in this sense but live in captivity, such as minks in a fur farm, captive elephants trained for working, and zebras in a zoo. These animals usually suffer a lot because of their use by human beings, and their situation is something that anyone concerned about animal suffering should be quite worried about.
Animal advocates have therefore struggled for a long time to defend them. However, this leaves out animals who do not live in captivity, who instead are covered by the concern that term "wild animal suffering" expresses. Borderline cases include animals who are used in farming but spend most of their lives unconfined.
An example we can think of is a goat, or a sheep, who spends all her life in the hills. Another term that is often used is "wildlife". This is an inaccurate term for wild animals for two reasons.
First, it is often used to refer to all kinds of living organisms. This doesn't differentiate animals from other organisms that are not sentient. Second, even when it is used to refer specifically to wild animals, the word "wildlife" is not a countable quantity, so it doesn't recognize animals as individuals.
So, to conclude, the word "wild" as used in "wild animal suffering" does not distinguish animals in terms of their species. It doesn't, like "wildlife", refer to them as an undifferentiated component of an ecosystem. It also has nothing to do with the assumption that they have a ferocious character or nature.
It just describes a circumstance they are in with regard to humans. People concerned about the situation of these animals sometimes use other terms. "Helping wild animals" is a term that has been used to refer to efforts to aid them.
The term "wild animal welfare" is used as a descriptive term for their situation from the point of view of their well-being. Note, however, that wild animal welfare has been used in several different ways. one way refers to the situation of undomesticated animals with respect to their well-being.
A second, to the regulations about the ways undomesticated animals are kept in captivity. And finally, the term "wild animal welfare" has been used to refer to the science that assesses the well-being of undomesticated animals. Due to this, there is the possibility of confusion, partly because this term is often used to refer to undomesticated animals living in captivity.
Finally, the term "welfare biology" is used for a proposed field of study that would examine the well-being of all animals, especially those living outside human control. it would primarily, though not necessarily only, study wild animal suffering. More technically, it can be defined as: the study of sentient living beings with respect to their positive and negative well-being.
Welfare biology would be a cross-disciplinary field, that includes wild animal welfare science together with contributions from ecology and other fields in the natural sciences. Wild animal welfare science would assess the well-being of animals by considering their behavior, physiology, and other indicators. Other fields like ecology would examine the external factors that affect it.
Welfare biology has the potential to inform policies to actually help wild animals and prevent the harms they suffer.
