Wildlife Cruelty, and Relational Ethics: Conservation, welfare and the ecoversity

Cruelty and wildlife objectification is an every day aspect of Australian society that eschews values of human kindness and the uniqueness and importance of life in the natural world. Fostered by institutional failure, greed and the worst aspects of human disregard and brutality the objectification of animals has its roots in longstanding Western anthropocentric philosophical perspectives and the global uptake of neoliberal capitalism has enabled brutality to escalate to a horrifying zenith. While conservation, animal rights and welfare movements have their place they have not stemmed growing wildlife brutality. So-called ‘green wash’ rhetoric attempts to give the violence ‘a respectable’ cover in the public arena by creating deceitful attachment to otherwise worthwhile movements. Relational objectification has increased the psycho-emotional distance between humans and wildlife enabling entrenched cruelty. In this paper we propose an approach to address the burgeoning culture of wildlife cruelty comprising three elements. First, a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife might view humans (Derrida 2004). Second, a geography of place and space (Bauman 1995 and 2001; Smith 2001) that has implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human - animal relations. Third, following Orr (1992), learning needs to be designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novelty, in delivering on the common good for wildlife. We propose the ‘ecoversity’ (Matthews and Garlick 2008), as a scholarly and practical framework for focussing the intersection of these three elements as an ethical approach to wildlife relations by humans