| Sunday, November 1, 2009 12:41PM | | | | Fairness to the Rabbit and the Wolf | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: Wild Justice. Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce, wolves, ravens, morality | In their splendid book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce argue that animals have a morality, in that their behavior is governed by codes based on moral qualities such as "forgiveness, fairness, retribution, reciprocity, and empathy." They generally assume, however, that animal morality is species-specific, and that may not necessarily be the case. People have, and have always had, moral precepts governing our interaction with animals and the environment, even if these are usually harder to formulate than those that concern interaction with other human beings. Animals often, perhaps invariably, live in symbiotic relations with other species. As Lawrence Kilham has documented, wolves and ravens not only hunt cooperatively but even sing together. And if both the pack of wolves and the flock of ravens is internally governed by a sense of fairness, it seems reasonable to expect that relations between the species might be as well.
Such rules would be more difficult to document than those that prevail within a species, since reciprocity is not as symmetrical, simple, or direct when it involves individuals of different species. But the major reason why we do not many examples of morality across lines of species may be because we have not looked for them. Predators, for example, generally kill prey before eating it, even if that is strictly necessary for the meal. Could something a bit like morality be involved? In Creation of the Sacred, the classicist Jacob Burkert argued that animals have behaviors similar to offering of sacrifice, when they offer food and even parts of their own body to distract a predator. In some cases at least, could such reciprocity evoke feeling that are like a sense of justice?
One instance that might be particularly interesting to investigate is whether there are codes that prevail between predators, prey, and scavengers. In Victorian times predation was considered the paradigm of amoral behavior, of "nature red in tooth and claw." Perhaps, though, it is a bit more complicated. Human hunting societies, as well as contemporary hunters, tend to have many elaborate rules governing the stalking of prey, which are often intended to insure the game has at least what the hunter considers "a sporting chance." Might, say, wolf packs have rules as well. And could such rules explain at least some aspects of the manner and circumstances under which they hunt?
Let us say that a wolf is chasing a rabbit and stops. We tend to assume that the wolf is getting tired or has concluded that pursuit is hopeless. Maybe, but could it also be that the rabbit has crossed some marker of territory, after which further pursuit would violate a sort of lupine taboo?
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