You’re walking along your usual path to work in a city or suburb when you come across a wild animal that is injured. What should you do? Should you stop and call a wildlife hotline so it can be collected and treated, or keep on walking and let nature take its course? What if the animal wasn’t on your usual path to work but in a pristine national park? The right thing to do then starts to become less obvious.

For most people, it would be nearly impossible to ignore an animal in distress. This has been demonstrated with the recent fires that have torn through large swathes of forests along the east coast of Australia. Footage of a woman courageously saving a helpless koala lost amongst the flames tugged at the nation’s collective heartstrings, if not the world’s. These acts of saving native wildlife should be commended as they are evidence that we deeply care about nature and our environment. However, is it morally right to intervene? By saving native animals in natural systems, we disrupt that system, albeit in a very subtle way.

Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay

We often place our desire to be kind above the needs of the system to remain in a natural state. However, more often than not, these well-meaning intentions do more harm than good. Many people attempt to “rescue” young animals they believed are orphaned when, in fact, many species leave their babies to search for food or divert attention away from their young. In one incident, a bison calf had to be euthanized after visitors from the Yellowstone National Park placed it in the trunk of their SUV thinking they were saving it from the cold.

However, if an animal is hurt or in distress, should we intervene? Imagine if every injured, sick, or old animal was collected and treated. Surely that system would become negatively affected by our meddling? Many species rely on these weak individuals as a stable part of their diet, and would starve if they were not present within the landscape. In our pursuit of kindness, we have forgotten that nature is cruel. This cruelty, over millions of years, has shaped the extravagant creatures we see today, and continues to maintain a balance of the natural systems that is imperative for their continued survival.

Image by Luicell from Pixabay

Of course, there are many reasons why we SHOULD intervene and disrupt nature’s flow. Some species have been pushed so close to the point of extinction that every single individual needs our protection. We have also altered many natural systems to such an extent that human intervention is a must in order to rescue them from imbalance. Consider the number of non-native species that have been introduced into systems around the world, and the number of species they have driven towards extinction. In these cases, it is best to leave it to the professionally trained conservation biologists and wildlife managers.

There are certainly some situations where helping a sick or wounded animal may be necessary. For example, animals that have been injured as a result of human activities, such as being hit by a car or attacked by a cat, should be carefully collected and treated in the hopes they can be introduced back into the wild.

But in systems that are mostly still natural, shouldn’t we do our best to leave it alone?

Written by John Gould