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9 Rel.: Beyond Anthropocentrism 9 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/relations9 and id is 1 raw text is: Pigs vs. Boars The Ethics of Assisting Domesticated and Wild Animals' Beka Jalagania Universitit Mannheim DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/rela-2021-0102-jala beka.jalagania@gmail.com ABSTRACT Among animal ethicists who accept that we have positive duties toward wild animals, there are some who maintain that these duties are considerably weaker than the duties we have toward domesticated animals, other things being equal. In this article I intend to examine whether this claim is true. To do this, I consider various factors that are often thought to render our duties to assist domesticated animals stronger than our duties to assist wild animals. My discussion will show that these factors fail to make our duties toward domesticated animals any stronger than our duties toward wild animals. Keywords: animal ethics; domesticated animals; domestication; duties of assis- tance; laissez-faire intuition; partiality; special relationships; vulnerability and dependence; wild animals; wild animal suffering. 1. INTRODUCTION In animal ethics, early discussions concerning duties to assist animals had primarily centered on domesticated animals 2. In these discussions it was widely agreed that by engaging in animal domestication, a practice that creates vulnerable animals unable to survive on their own, humans acquired duties to care for the animals resulting from this practice. Some authors went so far as to argue that domestication renders human socie- 1 I would like to thank Oscar Horta for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. 2 By domesticated animal I mean an animal who has been selectively bred by humans. Relations - 9.1-2 - November 2021 https://www.ledonline.it/Relations/ - Online ISSN 2280-9643 - Print ISSN 2283-3196 9