Introduction
On , a student wrote to me for a school project to ask my opinion on a few questions related to the following issue: "To what extent should wildlife photographers interfere with their subject matter?" This page contains a slightly edited version of my replies to those questions. I'm uploading this interview with permission.
The interview
What is the problem with interfering when filming or photographing a wild animal?
I can think of two main concerns offhand.
One issue is whether the intervention is actually causing a net benefit. There can be cases where people intervene with wildlife and actually make the situation worse for the animal being helped. I should add that I think that saving an animal from predation doesn't fall into this category, because the benefit to the prey animal is more substantial than the hunger of the predator. (An exception could be if the prey animal was already seriously injured and so would face a protracted death if not fully killed and eaten.)
A second consideration is that it's important to show some amount of nature's brutality in order to enable people to see the widespread horror that's going on all the time in the wilderness. These long-term effects on people's consciousness can be more significant than helping a few animals right away. Related to this idea, I came across an article about intervening to help humans (Ricchiardi 2017) in which Rachel Smolkin explains regarding journalists covering Hurricane Katrina:
their most enduring service was to expose the suffering of citizens trapped in hellish shelters and on sweltering interstates and to document the inexcusable government response.
Without journalists fulfilling that essential role, the resources to help on a larger scale might never have arrived.
And Roger Simpson echoes: "Understand that holding the camera or recording what you see and hear may be the most effective way of intervening."
What circumstances would warrant an interference?
I would favor interfering any time the photographer thinks doing so would reduce net harm and wouldn't be dangerous, except maybe in a few rare cases where filming the horror taking place would have a significantly big effect on changing the minds of viewers. There may also be the issue that there could be too many animals for it to be possible to help them all. I imagine that's the situation faced by people who take undercover footage in factory farms. However, as the famous "starfish story" illustrates (e.g., see Straube (2011), a person can still rescue some wild animals even without being able to rescue them all.
Do humans have an ethical obligation to interfere with an animal's death or is it a case where only deaths directly linked with human impacts should be interfered with?
I think humans should help all involuntarily suffering beings, regardless of why they're suffering. Injured animals don't necessarily know or care whether they were injured by humans or by nature; they just want the pain to stop.
The main reason I can see why it makes rational sense to expect a greater degree of help when humans have injured the animal is that forcing people to "clean up their own messes" is sort of a punishment/deterrent against causing future harm.
What is the importance of animals dying in the wild and therefore why should humans refrain from interfering in nature?
I think it's bad for animals to die in the wild, and humans should interfere. :) We could imagine a similar question posed about humans: "What is the importance of humans dying from famine/disease/war and therefore why should other people refrain from interfering?"
The main caveat I would add is that the long-run effects of any given action are quite unpredictable, and sometimes helping animals in the short term could be net bad in the long term. As an example, maybe helping an injured wolf is actually net bad because the wolf will go on to painfully kill lots of other animals. Similar uncertainty applies in human situations too; for example, maybe the child you save from drowning will grow up to carry out the Holocaust (Willis 2012).
While it depends on the specific situation, as a general matter I'm not particularly convinced by environmentalist arguments about the need to avoid disrupting ecological balance, because it's not clear to me that any given ecosystem's natural balance should be preserved. I think the happiness that wild animals experience during parts of their lives doesn't compensate for the horrors like being eaten alive that are forced upon them, which means that it's better if fewer wild animals exist. Nature is an efficient factory for producing suffering, and disturbing ecosystems won't necessarily increase net harm; doing so may even reduce net harm in some cases.