Expanding human demands toward land, sea, and water, together with the impacts of temperature change, have made the conservation and management of natural areas and wild animals a top priority. But there are many various reasons for thinking that such preservation is vital, and these reasons can shape conservation policies in several ways. Here we’ll explore a number of the different underlying values which will direct conservation policy and explain how they’ll make ethical dilemmas and disagreements. If your home needs a cleaning from wildlife animals such as bat, you can contact bat infestation removal.
Wild animals have been a critical resource for men. Wildlife has made a ways for high economic and cultural significance. Wild animals give entertainment in circuses, wildlife parks and zoos. They form a central attraction in international tourism, and that they are vital members of ecosystems on which humans rely for vital services. Equally, wild animals are often seen as threatening to human beings; as an example, they will be sources of recent human diseases (zoonotic) and damage or consume human crops. Whether as a resource or threat, what matters here is how useful — or otherwise — wildlife is to groups of people.
In modern debates about wildlife, however, other values became increasingly important. One focus is the wellbeing of individual wild animals. There are concerns about protecting species or populations of untamed animals, preserving the ecosystems of which wild animals form a component, and protecting wild nature itself.
Although the concept of “wildlife” is sometimes taken to mean animals not bred or controlled by humans, increasingly, wild animals aren’t just left alone to measure their own lives. The concept of the purity, beauty and special significance of untamed places became increasingly dominant within the nineteenth century. It served to underpin the muse of the US National Parks system and eventually the US Wilderness Act of 1964. However, various and potentially conflicting values also played a role — and still do — as a basis for such initiatives to safeguard wild nature.
Mature males (stags) compete for the eye of the females (hinds) within the mating ritual (rut) period by producing the loudest roar. The management of deer is an essential ethical concern in many countries, generating ethical disagreements during which human preferences, concern for individual animals, the worth of biodiversity, and wild nature need to be balanced.
The preservationist’s goal is to shield pristine nature, not to use it, carefully or otherwise. If the human intervention has damaged wild nature (for instance, by pollution), then projects to revive nature to something like its former state are permissible. But apart from genuine restoration cases, from a preservationist perspective, wild places should be allowed to develop independently with as little interference from humans as possible.
Humans should make sole use of protected areas for recreation, and only then if recreation leaves no trace behind.
More recently, values besides resource values and, therefore, the value of “untouched” nature became increasingly important in wildlife management. These include the worth of whole ecological systems, species, and specifically, the importance of animal welfare. We’ll discuss these in additional detail below.
Dilemmas and conflicts.
These different values make to conflicts or dilemmas. For example, there could also be a conflict between sustaining certain human livelihoods and preserving a specific species or a dilemma between protecting untamed nature and animal welfare. The question, then, is how we should always address such difficulties and disagreements. We’ll now outline five possible ethical perspectives on these problems, drawn from environmental and animal ethics.