FOR THE ANIMALS’ SAKE: MULTISPECIES ETHICS IN WISCONSIN WILDLIFE REHABILITATION CENTERS

Abstract

In our anthropocentric world, no animal is free from human impact. This world, with humans at the center, is largely compounded by competing “and often conflicting social perspectives, inflexible legislative constraints, and shifting political agendas” (Paquet & Darimont, 2010, p.184) which often fail to consider the interests of our nonhuman kin. The wildlife rehabilitation field seeks to mitigate these impacts through caring for injured, orphaned, and displaced wildlife. Climate change, habitat fragmentation, and other large-scale human impacts continue contributing to a global increase in human-wildlife conflict as animals seek resources in closer proximity to human communities (Abrahms et al, 2023). As just one of the professions committed to wildlife welfare, the demands of wildlife rehabilitation centers (WRCs) are increasing. A few WRCs in Wisconsin care for as many as 5,000 wild animals per year, excluding the small animals not included in the intake statistics. Wildlife rehabilitators, in addition to this intense workload, encounter life-or-death ethical dilemmas while making decisions on an animal's care. Ethics helps to explain the life-worlds of wildlife rehabilitators, and how we as a public interpret our relationships to the nonhuman world. Multispecies ethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field within environmental studies which prioritizes the intertwined relations of how various living beings coexist, influence each other’s lives, and form new co-narrated realities. Multispecies studies integrate theory and practice; therefore, my methods (especially those regarding humanistic interpretation) are directly informed by the theoretical groundings of the field. The theory behind multispecies ethics is rooted in “multispecies ethnography, etho-ethnology, anthropology of life, anthropology beyond humanity, extinction studies, and more-than-human geographies” (van Dooren et al., 2016). Exploring the complexity of rehabilitator’s decision-making processes through a multispecies approach places focus on the diverse situational factors of each individual patient within the broader ecological community. This thesis leverages a framework of care, ethical pluralism, and oral history to articulate the co-created narratives, realities, and associations developed between wildlife in wildlife rehabilitation settings and the professionals who work with them. This study aims to overcome the applied-theory gap in previous multispecies ethics research through humanistic interpretation of semi-structured interviews and participant observation at WRCs in Southern Wisconsin.1 I employ a metaethical and multispecies approach to examine each WRC’s unique applied ethical perspective, and how these perspectives merge in public-facing interactions. In this unique space of wildlife rehabilitation, I attempt to uncover the nature of rehabilitators’ moral judgments (metaethics) regarding wildlife suffering and, to an equal extent, how these ethics are practically applied.