We are pleased to announce we have just released the first video of an online video course on wild animal suffering. This first video gives an overview of the topics that will be covered. Starting next month, we will be regularly publishing the course videos, which will be 28 in total. In a few weeks, we will publish a book with the contents of the course. If you’re interested in learning even more about the subject, we have many other articles on our website on the topics covered in the course.
The course is intended to cover the key ideas about the importance of wild animal suffering, and to clarify the many misconceptions that people may have about it.
The course is divided into three modules. The first module begins by clarifying the concepts involved in describing what wild animal suffering is and what it is not. It then provides details about the situation of animals in the wild. The module describes many harms they face from weather, disasters, and diseases, among other hardships, due to which life in the wild is far from idyllic for animals. It then moves on to describing the ways we can help animals living in the wild, including the ways society is already helping them.
The second module covers the moral consideration of animals, including the arguments about speciesism and the arguments in support of respecting all sentient beings. The module covers contemporary debates in ethics concerning these issues. It discusses what different ethical theories have to say about the moral consideration of animals and their points of convergence. Lastly, it covers what sentience is and the evidence concerning which animals are sentient. It pays special attention to the topic of invertebrate sentience.
The final module covers the subject of welfare biology, which is the study of animals living in the wild that focuses on their wellbeing as individuals. The module describes the form that this discipline could take and a great amount of good that it could do if it becomes a fully fledged academic discipline. It describes why this discipline should be promoted and what the best ways of doing this are. It also discusses objections to the idea of helping animals in the wild and the responses to these objections.
You can watch the video here:
We hope that this course introducing the subject of wild animal suffering will be of interest to you. We expect that this format will reach more people and provide more in-depth education than articles on the subject would be able to do. We also hope it will kindle a desire to research the subject further and to begin acting to help animals living in the wild. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified when new videos are released.