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By Root 673 0

And in the same way the deer evolved a specific set of characteristics under the pressure of hunting by wolves (fleetness, sensory acuity, coloration, etc.), so have the animals that humans have hunted. Human hunting, for example, literally helped form the American Plains bison, which the fossil record suggests changed both physically and behaviorally after the arrival of the Indians. Before then the bison did not live in big herds and had much larger, more outstretched horns. For an animal living in a wide-open environment like the Great Plains and facing a sophisticated predator armed with spears, mobbing in big groups is the best defense, since it affords the vigilance of many eyes; yet big, outstretched horns pose a problem for creatures living in such close proximity. It was human hunting that selected for herd behavior and the new upright arrangement of bison horns, which appears in the fossil record not long after the arrival of human hunters. “While a symbol of the ‘wild west,’” Tim Flannery writes in The Eternal Frontier, an ecological history of North America, “the bison is a human artifact, for it was shaped by Indians.”

Until the advent of the rifle and a global market in bison hides, horns, and tongues, Indian hunters and bison lived in a symbiotic relationship, the bison feeding and clothing the hunters while the hunters, by culling the herds and forcing them to move frequently, helped keep the grasslands in good health. Predation is deeply woven into the fabric of nature, and that fabric would quickly unravel if it somehow ended, if humans somehow managed “to do something about it.” From the point of view of the individual prey animal predation is a horror, but from the point of view of the group—and of its gene pool—it is indispensable. So whose point of view shall we favor? That of the individual bison or Bison? The pig or Pig? Much depends on how you choose to answer that question.

Ancient man regarded animals much more as a modern ecologist would than an animal philosopher—as a species, that is, rather than a collection of individuals. In the ancient view “they were mortal and immortal,” John Berger writes in “Looking at Animals.” “An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox.” Which, when you think about it, is probably pretty much how any species in nature regards another.

Until now. For the animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals. Tom Regan, the author of The Case for Animal Rights, bluntly asserts that because “species are not individuals…the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.” Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests—in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat—just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature? Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat?

As I write, a team of sharpshooters in the employ of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy is at work killing thousands of feral pigs on Santa Cruz Island, eighteen miles off the coast of Southern California. The slaughter is part of an ambitious plan to restore the island’s habitat and save the island fox, an endangered species found on a handful of Southern California islands and nowhere else. To save the fox the Park Service and Nature Conservancy must first undo a complicated chain of ecological changes wrought by humans beginning more than a century ago.

That’s when the pigs first arrived on Santa Cruz, imported by ranchers. Though pig farming ended on the island in the 1980s, by then enough pigs had escaped to establish a wild population that has done grave damage to the island ecosystem. The rooting of the pigs disturbs the soil, creating ideal conditions