I find the final question about human intervention fascinating.
The scientists aren’t recommending intervention, even if the perpetrators tend to be the same few individuals. “We don’t know how natural it is,” says Ursula Siebert, a veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife population health at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover who was not involved with the work. “It can definitely be hard to watch,” Langley adds. “But the life of a seal—and indeed any wild animal—is tough.”
This idea that human influence over nature should not reach beyond species boundaries, that there is no universal value common to several species, seems prevalent in natural sciences. Is it coming from an understandable but misleading distrust of human society and idealisation of "nature", or from a deeper understanding that "nature always knows better", I can't decide.
I think the main point is that nature is in a dynamic equilibrium that's built up over eons. We disrupt that equilibrium unintentionally by things like development, but well intended disruptions can have just as negative effects. The typical example would be something like removing a predator (or even a disease) from an area which results in a population explosion of its former prey which results in increased pressures on what that prey eat and so on all the way down the food chain.
And it's not just hypothetical - for instance gray wolves were largely eliminated from many areas with catastrophic consequences. They're now being reintroduced in many places and you get interesting effects like it turning out that gray wolves were effectively helping keeping a healthy beaver population, which is particularly interesting given that beavers are prey for wolves! [1] It's just a really interesting interbalance, and changing one thing can have consequences that are practically impossible to predict.
This is the reason I'm not a fan of the idea of eliminating even mosquitoes at large. Unforeseen consequences are very much a thing, and those consequences don't inherently become 'seen' because of a study or two.
I want the bill for damages caused with reintroduction- to be sent to the local GREEN party and its voters, thank you very much. Reintroduction of the beaver in europe has caused millions in damages
We have absolutely no way of reconciling ethics with animals. In human society, the same individuals will often be using force against others but those individuals may be the police or criminals. The notion of righteousness or injustice in a given situation is contingent on context. Until we can speak with animals, we lack that context. Violence is not inherently wrong: we do not know their nature.
The mature view is that it boils down to the “Chesterton’s Fence” concept. Rather than “humans bad, nature good”, we just don’t know if the result of intervention might be an unfit population / ecosystem.
The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
First, we value human life above animal life, so we always prioritize humans and their pleasures above animals (with the limits being either another human's property, or when the human is showing signs of excessive brutality, such as intentionally torturing animals instead of simply killing them).
Then, when a human is not directly involved, what matters is the potential impact of any intervention. Nature is extraordinarily brutal by itself, and we can't hope to change that overall, regardless of what we might prefer. Even at a basic emotional & moral level, we can't protect every baby animal that gets killed by a predator or a parasite, regardless of the suffering we see in it, or we would be causing the death of the predator's babies to starvation. And then, at a more rational higher scale, we know that this type of intervention would typically end up destroying the entire ecosystem if we actually tried to do it consistently.
It's also a inability to accept the cthullian horror built into nature.
Sentient eating sentient, everything being at constant warfare with everything else- the Grass wars the trees for the light. Add to that, the likelihood that nature will adapt new defenses in our lifetime, by for example having animals propagate hyper-allergenic plant-species - and you can begin to grasp why humanity does not want to look at the real, rather at the idyllic paintings we made ourselves.
We’ve a storied history of making ecological interventions without fully understanding the consequences. Doing the work to fully understand the consequences is time consuming and expensive. IMO it comes a position of leaving well enough alone.
So strange when you look at our total interaction with the environment. We kill millions of animals, many just for literal sport, but to save an animal from another is 'too much intervention'
And I bet the moral scientists sat there feeling sorry for themselves and for the seal. Meanwhile other people are destroying full ecosystems.
If you feel like saving an animal from another, do it, what a ridiculous horse to decide to sit on. This to me makes as much sense as me walking my dog, another dog attacking it and me throwing my hands up "nothing I can do, nature is doing its thing".
There's a species where each individual literally eats a billion animals over its lifetime. If saving animals from an early death is important, then we should do everything we can to make blue whales go extinct.
I once lived in an apartment in Colorado with a balcony overlooking a pond. Once a grebe was paddling around in it followed by four chicks. It was a great image for the Colorado Tourism Office. Then mamma grebe swam back and swallowed the fourth chick whole, and the smaller family paddled away.
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
> In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
When I was in college I worked in a lab where part of my job was killing rats (I actually had a real moral problem that the general term used for the killing of lab animals at this time was "sacrificing", e.g. "I sac'ed that litter of rats yesterday", because it felt like a way to lessen ones natural emotional guilt at the task. Not sure if that term is still used today.) I really had a moral quandary in what I did, even moreso because I felt a visceral disgust (like I actually threw up a bit) the first time I had to kill a rat and then cut off its head with a pair of scissors, but after I got used to it I had no problem with it - I came to understand how people can get used to doing things they originally found morally reprehensible, and it scared me about myself.
Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
> The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, Langley speculates.
Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous.
EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says
> Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own.
As I understood it, the blubber is being eaten and the rest is left. The sheer number of carcasses makes me wonder if this blubber is relatively easy to extract using this method, so they kind of rove through the herd and pick the low hanging fruit, so to speak
Oddly enough, I've seen a similar injury on a dolphin before. Well, the head was missing, but the cutoff point could be described as "corkscrew". None of us had a good idea of the cause, but this hints it may have been predation or scavenging.
And it's not just hypothetical - for instance gray wolves were largely eliminated from many areas with catastrophic consequences. They're now being reintroduced in many places and you get interesting effects like it turning out that gray wolves were effectively helping keeping a healthy beaver population, which is particularly interesting given that beavers are prey for wolves! [1] It's just a really interesting interbalance, and changing one thing can have consequences that are practically impossible to predict.
This is the reason I'm not a fan of the idea of eliminating even mosquitoes at large. Unforeseen consequences are very much a thing, and those consequences don't inherently become 'seen' because of a study or two.
[1] - https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-r...
The result of this, of course, is that we tend to intervene a lot when humans are affected (massive industrial footprints, screw-worms, etc) and a lot less when it’s irrelevant to human welfare. We are, by nature, biased towards the anthropic.
First, we value human life above animal life, so we always prioritize humans and their pleasures above animals (with the limits being either another human's property, or when the human is showing signs of excessive brutality, such as intentionally torturing animals instead of simply killing them).
Then, when a human is not directly involved, what matters is the potential impact of any intervention. Nature is extraordinarily brutal by itself, and we can't hope to change that overall, regardless of what we might prefer. Even at a basic emotional & moral level, we can't protect every baby animal that gets killed by a predator or a parasite, regardless of the suffering we see in it, or we would be causing the death of the predator's babies to starvation. And then, at a more rational higher scale, we know that this type of intervention would typically end up destroying the entire ecosystem if we actually tried to do it consistently.
Sentient eating sentient, everything being at constant warfare with everything else- the Grass wars the trees for the light. Add to that, the likelihood that nature will adapt new defenses in our lifetime, by for example having animals propagate hyper-allergenic plant-species - and you can begin to grasp why humanity does not want to look at the real, rather at the idyllic paintings we made ourselves.
And I bet the moral scientists sat there feeling sorry for themselves and for the seal. Meanwhile other people are destroying full ecosystems.
If you feel like saving an animal from another, do it, what a ridiculous horse to decide to sit on. This to me makes as much sense as me walking my dog, another dog attacking it and me throwing my hands up "nothing I can do, nature is doing its thing".
Brood reduction isn't common in grebes, but I saw it anyway, and thought maybe I didn't get the straight dope from Disney movies growing up.
> In these three booby species, hatching order indicates chick hierarchy in the nest. The A-chick is dominant to the B-chick, which in turn is dominant to the C chick, etc. (when there are more than two chicks per brood). Masked booby and Nazca booby dominant A-chicks always begin pecking their younger sibling(s) as soon as they hatch; moreover, assuming it is healthy, the A-chick usually pecks its younger sibling to death or pushes it out of the nest scrape within the first two days that the junior chick is alive. Blue-footed booby A-chicks also express their dominance by pecking their younger sibling. However, unlike the obligately siblicidal masked and Nazca booby chicks, their behavior is not always lethal. A study by Lougheed and Anderson (1999) reveals that blue-footed booby senior chicks only kill their siblings in times of food shortage.
Anyway, I always found my guilt was assuaged at least a little bit if a mama rat would eat one of the babies by herself. "Hey, I'm no worse than the mom!" I'd say to myself. Then I felt a lot worse when I came to understand that moms tend to eat their babies when under high stress or when they think a baby is sick, which was probably a result of living in the lab in the first place.
Same energy as this short story.
https://hpmor.com/
Wonder if the male killer is of the same bloodline? Lions often opportunistically kill offspring of other males to reduce competition for their own offspring and to bring females into estrous.
EDIT: FWIW I asked claude and it says
> Gray seals have a promiscuous, harem-based mating system, but paternity is diffuse and males don't guard specific females long-term the way lions do. A bull has little way of "knowing" which pups are his rivals' offspring vs. his own.
So seems unlikely (according to claude).