There is a tension in wild animal welfare that arises when individualist (i.e. animal welfare/rights) and communitarian (i.e. environmentalist) philosophies lead to different policy prescriptions (e.g. hunting possums).

Here, I’m not going to provide an analysis of other philosophical position. I have studied and researched in environmentalism, and I was mainly immersed in environmental ethics during my undergraduate and PhD years. My current job and some of my previous work (e.g. volunteering for the Animal Justice Party) is in animal welfare advocacy, so I’m currently mainly immersed in animal ethics. Of course, I find animal ethics the more compelling philosophical position - I find some of the tenets of environmentalism to be poorly founded or insufficiently reasoned. This doesn’t mean I’m against environmentalism! But when it comes to policy trade-offs, my personal preference generally sides with the position associated with individualist (animal rights/welfare) ethics.

Today in mainstream society in most Western/industrialised countries, most people tend to have some support for environmental ethics and some support for animal ethics - all else being equal, most people would think that more rainforests is a good thing and happier puppies is a good thing. However, neither position is universally accepted. Moreover, environmental ethics has had greater adoption by mainstream institutions, such as governments and supra-national organisations (e.g. the United Nations). This means that animal advocacy organisations sometimes need to carefully navigate situations where there is a perceived or real trade-off between environmentalist ethics and animal ethics.

In the Australian Animal Justice Party the approach to this trade-off seems to be: focus on non-lethal control (e.g. wild-life friendly fencing, contraception, trap-neuter-release), additional resources for wild animal rescues and sanctuaries, and bringing the attention to why these animals are perceived to be causing trouble. Even among ecologists there is typically an understanding that ecosystems and ecological populations can normally withstand one threat (e.g. introduced predators) as long as other threats are kept under control (e.g. land clearing for animal agriculture). So emphasising the role that humans have played in causing this conflict (especially in industrial animal agriculture, of course!), asking why (say) cats and native birds are competing for resources when so much habitat is cleared for animal agriculture, and how this conflict can be resolved by supporting wildlife and supporting wildlife organisations in other ways. You can see a few example policies here on horses, introduced animals, and mice.

While these issues can be divisive, and there is a subtle distinction between animal voters and green voters as electorates (see Otjes and Krouwel who discuss Netherlands’s Partij voor de Dieren), typically there is a large overlap between people who care about animals and people who care about the environment. So I reckon aiming for win-wins, as I describe above, might be smart where this is possible in a particular policy context. This draws the attention away from conflict and helps to unite potential voters. (Though this conflict never really goes away, and political parties and advocacy organisations have had more than one internal conflict on this type of issue. I’ve heard that the AJP in Australia was originally a splinter of Greens members who were dissatisfied with the way wild animals were treated, though I might be misremembering.)

For what it’s worth, from a dispassionate scientific perspective, it does seem empirically valid that wild populations can often withstand threats from introduced predators if there is sufficient quality habitat etc. And eradication programs have been notoriously unsuccessful, with population models and empirical studies typically showing that driving any established introduced animal species to local extinction is unfeasible and populations bounce back as soon as the eradication program stops. I wrote a small amount on this topic as part of my PhD thesis.

This debate is especially relevant in: