ITS EDUCATION ASIA ARTICLE

Real experience of wild animal life?

By Danny Harrington, MD ITS Education Asia

A rather good article in The Conversation by Heather Browning and Walter Veit tackles the difficult question of what the overall experience of life might be for wild animals. This is an area which tends to succumb to the simplification of ideas that humans often prefer, especially in groupthink. On the one hand is a tradition of (over?) idealizing life in the wild and on the other of (over?) dramatizing it as a desperate struggle for survival ending in a painful death.

The authors do a great job of putting the observable facts into context and showing the actuality is probably somewhere in between and, just as with human lives, some will be lucky to have much better ones than others.

Overall, the article is a good read just to reinforce our gut instinct that nature is very much worthwhile in and of itself.