Episode 637 - Ben Allen || Someone Has To Die

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Origins Foundation Podcast

Episode 637 – Ben Allen || Someone Has To Die
Date: April 14, 2026
Guest: Dr. Ben Allen (wildlife scientist, author, wildlife management consultant, Australia)
Host: Robbie Kroger

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Episode Overview

This episode takes a deep dive into the ethics of intentional animal killing within wildlife management, conservation, and hunting. Dr. Ben Allen, an Australian wildlife scientist and prolific author, joins host Robbie Kroger for a far-reaching, nuanced, and often provocative conversation on how and why humans kill animals, the ethical frameworks that underpin (and challenge) these actions, and how society navigates the uncomfortable reality that, in nature, “someone has to die.”

Drawing on Ben Allen’s research, the conversation explores the disconnect between public perception and ecological reality, societal discomfort with death in the natural world, and the urgent need for clear, robust ethical arguments in wildlife management. The episode is both philosophical and grounded in real-world challenges, aiming to equip listeners—especially those working in conservation, policy, and hunting communities—with a deeper understanding of where ethical debates truly lie and how to engage them constructively.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Dr. Ben Allen’s Background & Perspective

• Ben describes growing up in a science-centric household; his father was a renowned dingo biologist (05:29).
• He worked extensively on dingoes and pest mammals in Australia, eventually moving from academia (University of Southern Queensland) to private-sector environmental consultancy (09:47, 11:04).
• He views wildlife management as “the best job in the world”—combining fieldwork, research, and practical interventions (11:04).

Quote [09:44]:
“I used to always joke with people that I had the best job in the world which was get paid to go four-wheeling, camping, fishing, hunting, sleeping under the stars. It's like, you're a little boy and you grow up and you're still getting paid to do it.”

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2. The Necessity of Death in Nature ("Someone Has To Die")

• Dr. Allen uses “death games” in school education to illustrate natural predation dynamics (15:13).
• “Someone has to die” is an ecological truth inherent in all food webs—there’s no scenario where every individual survives (16:24).
• Wildlife managers “orchestrate that game”: choosing, out of necessity, which animals live or die, and when and how (16:55).

Quote [16:27]:
“There’s no scenario where everybody gets to live. Someone has to die. And this is Mother Nature. Someone has to die… When they go out into the real world, this is what Mother Nature does.”

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3. Modern Society’s Disconnection from Nature and Death

• Urbanization and a loss of direct interaction with the land foster a “detachment from the reality of nature” (18:19).
• Many modern animal welfare views are shaped by idealized media and AI-generated stories—detached from actual ecological processes (22:10).
• Well-intentioned “save the (animal)” campaigns often ignore that avoiding death in one place causes inevitable suffering or death elsewhere (23:13, 24:29).

Quote [18:53]:
“In Western society at least, we’ve become a little bit disconnected... There's just a bit of a detachment from the reality of sort of nature.”

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4. Critiquing Mainstream Narratives & AI-Driven Misinformation

• Social and AI media distort natural predator-prey relationships, often anthropomorphizing animals or proposing “harm-free” solutions that are ecologically impossible (22:10, 24:29).
• Extreme proponents even suggest “herbivorizing” predators, which would undermine entire ecosystems (24:29–24:38).

Quote [24:36]:
“To the extent that they achieve what they want, bye bye lions. Bye bye leopards... The only reason a leopard looks like a leopard is because it eats other things.”

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5. The Evolutionary and Ecological Necessity of Harm

• Allen details the evolutionary “arms race” between predator and prey as the fundamental reason biodiversity exists (26:39).
• Removing death or suffering from natural systems would lead to extinction and collapse of ecosystems (27:30).

Quote [27:54]:
“If you take away the harm and the killing and the pain and the suffering… ultimately leads in species extinctions and loss of biodiversity.”

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6. Ethical Arguments: The Need for a Robust, Shared Vocabulary

• Wildlife managers are often “on the back foot” in debates, lacking the ethical language to defend necessary management actions (13:35, 29:11).
• Welfare arguments are frequently “Trojan horses” for underlying ethical objections (29:42).
• It’s essential to distinguish between animal welfare (how animals die) and ethics (whether it’s justified to kill them at all) (33:24, 66:52).

Quote [29:42]:
“Welfare was being used as a Trojan horse for ethical arguments... We’re interested in an ethical issue: I just don't want you to kill it.”

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7. Eight Frameworks for Ethical Justification of Intentional Animal Killing

(Based on Allen’s landmark multi-author paper: “Ethical Arguments that Support Intentional Animal Killing”)

• Allen outlines eight common ethical frameworks, focusing on four principal ones in conservation:

  1. Consequentialism (Net benefit, “the math”)
  2. Environmental Ethics (The good of the ecosystem or collective)
  3. Deontology / Animal Rights (Duties and rights, individual-centric)
  4. Virtue Ethics (Focus on moral character & intent, e.g., compassion)

• Each framework can, under certain circumstances, be used to justify intentional killing (41:36–59:23).

1. Consequentialism (utilitarian) [45:16, 47:15]

• Example: Killing 100 rats to save 1,000 shorebirds is justified by the net benefit.
• Most Western conservation policy implicitly uses this framework.

2. Environmental Ethics [45:16, 46:19]

• The good of the whole ecosystem over the individual.
• Killing is permissible if it restores balance, prevents greater harm to the ecosystem.

3. Deontology / Animal Rights [50:21, 52:57]

• Focuses on duty and rights. Some forms provide limited permission to kill (“mini-ride principle”): e.g., when not killing would mean all die, saving some at the expense of one can be justified.

Quote [53:27]:
“The Mini Ride principle essentially says it's better to kill the one and save the 49 when they're all going to die.”

4. Virtue Ethics [56:06]

• Looks to intent and character (compassion, mercy). Sometimes killing is the more compassionate act (e.g., putting a suffering animal down).
• No rigid rules, always contextual.

Quote [56:06]:
“Virtue ethics is more about your feelings... We want to treat animals compassionately… but sometimes, out of compassion, you would do something harmful.”

• Key Point:
  These frameworks “arrive at permission to engage in intentional animal killing” through different rationales. Recognizing which framework is in play can clarify debates and improve management decisions (46:29, 59:23).

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8. Practical Application: Policy, Management, and Public Discourse

• In practice, scientific managers and policymakers should identify which ethical frameworks are relevant, and where their justifications do and do not apply (55:00).
• Debates should move beyond whether killing is ever allowed (always contentious), toward how to ensure the least possible suffering—i.e., focusing on welfare (59:23).

Quote [59:23]:
“Debate should focus on the tools that we use and whether or not they're effective in reducing the harm, the management objectives, rather than getting into arguments about ethics, which just goes nowhere.”

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9. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On nature’s reality:
  “There’s no scenario where everybody gets to live. Someone has to die.” (16:27 – Allen)

• On urban disconnect:
  “It’s got something to do with human populations becoming more urbanized... a bit of a detachment from the reality of nature.” (18:19 – Allen)

• On illogical popular narratives:
  “AI is making us all dumber. You guys aren’t thinking… you just hook, line, and sinker believe it.” (22:25 – Kroger)

• On the “herbivorizing predators” idea:
  “The only reason a leopard looks like a leopard is because it eats other things. If you made it eat sheep, it would not look like a leopard, it would look like a sheep.” (24:38 – Allen)

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10. Timestamps for Important Segments

• Dr. Ben Allen’s background & early influences: 05:29 – 09:47
• Death games & “someone has to die”: 15:13 – 17:50
• Society’s detachment from nature: 18:19 – 21:21
• Social media, AI, and distorted narratives: 22:10 – 24:29
• Ethics versus welfare; Trojan horse argument: 29:42 – 33:24
• Four main ethical frameworks, with examples: 45:16 – 59:23
• Virtue ethics and compassion: 56:06 – 59:23
• Practical recommendations for wildlife managers and communicators: 59:23 – 60:34
• Reflections on hunting, fairness, and tool choice: 65:43 – 67:53

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Tone and Style

• The conversation is intellectually rigorous, direct, and often self-deprecating (with good humor throughout: “did you tell the audience you’re not a real doctor?” 03:39).
• Both host and guest stress candor: neither shies away from controversy nor seeks to simplify complex topics.
• The tone is both accessible and practical, aiming to empower listeners to handle ethical challenges with clarity, not just slogans.

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Key Takeaways

• Death and harm are inescapable realities of nature and wildlife management.
• Public debates are rife with confusion between welfare (method of killing) and ethics (justification for killing).
• There is no universal ethical framework; robust arguments can be made for intentional killings within multiple philosophical systems.
• For effective conservation, managers and advocates must understand—and be clear about—which ethical philosophy underpins both their own rationale and that of their critics.
• Focus on ensuring the least possible suffering is the most widely accepted and actionable ground for agreement.
• AI and social media complicate, rather than clarify, the public’s relationship with hard ecological truths.
• “What’s not natural about a human walking across the savannah and killing an animal?”—hunting is part of our species’ story, not a modern aberration.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a compelling resource for anyone committed to conservation, wildlife management, or the ethics of hunting and animal welfare. Rather than offering easy answers, it presents the complexity honestly and equips listeners with the conceptual tools to navigate the deepest and hardest conversations in the sustainable use space.

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Further Resources

• Paper: “Ethical Arguments that Support Intentional Animal Killing” (2025)
• [Recommended podcast summary by AI, discussed at 60:34]
• Ben Allen’s other work on the necessity of animal killing and the complexity of human-wildlife coexistence

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Memorable Closing

Dr. Ben Allen [68:16]:
“Definitely happy to do it anytime. Always a pleasure.”

Transcript

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[Robbie Kroger]

Dr. Benjamin Allen Ben Allen is a scientist in Australia. He now works in the private sector in wildlife management. The guy says he has the best job in the world. He goes camping and fishing and hunting and predator control and all these things. I came across Ben as He is the lead author in a number of articles tied to ethical arguments that support intentional animal killing. Yes, you heard that correct. He has gone through the ethical arguments, deontological consequentialism, virtue ethics, environmental ethics, religion, yada yada yada, and said here is the rationale to which you can use to defend killing animals under that specific ethical argument he goes into. In this podcast you'll hear the difference between where most people are talking on the social media space, in the animal welfare space, non the animal ethics ethics space. So, a phenomenal podcast. I know you're going to love it. Please share this with your friends. Even listen to it once, twice, three times so that you actually understand what is being said. It's very, very deep, but it's worth the listen, so enjoy. So five years ago there was a reason why I started this movement and the truth then is the truth now that we need to champion our narrative. We need to champion the truth around what we do and who we are.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

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[Robbie Kroger]

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[Dr. Ben Allen]

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[Robbie Kroger]

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[Dr. Ben Allen]

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[Robbie Kroger]

That is such an amazing analogy. Snakes and ladders.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

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[Dr. Ben Allen]

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[Robbie Kroger]

Let me close this door because I have a little wiener dog. What?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

You are.

[Robbie Kroger]

You're laughing because I said wiener.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

I'm really glad you finished the sentence out.

[Robbie Kroger]

I'm sorry.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

The first happened doing here today.

[Robbie Kroger]

You're telling the whole world. I literally just came off like a speaking engagement piece at a convention five times.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

And my, my friend, I get introduced as Dr. Robbie Kroger.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

And my friends like to say I'll come off stage. And they say, did you tell the audience that you're not a proper doctor? Right. You just like, if a medical emergency happened, you wouldn't be able to help anybody.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

I can help. I'm not sure to be successful procedure, but I'll give it a go.

[Robbie Kroger]

I will say this. You know how you have like, you build up perceptions of people in your

[Dr. Ben Allen]

mind

[Robbie Kroger]

and given the topic that we're going to discuss, ethics, ethiological theories. I totally assumed you to be a wisened old white haired glasses professor. You know, that was going to. And here you are like me, probably my age.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

I'm 46.

[Robbie Kroger]

No gray hairs yet.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah, no. Well, they're coming. You work in a space like this, you can feel them growing, but it's a. It's a challenging space, but one that I enjoy. And I don't know if I end up. If I end up with white hair and a big beard or something, I'll be fine with that.

[Robbie Kroger]

Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, Dr. Ben Allen, I'm going to introduce you properly because if I didn't would go on for probably 20 minutes without me even introducing you. Welcome to the Origins foundation podcast. I know this is going to be a. A fascinating conversation. I apologize it's taken us so long to connect on this and it's just part of your schedule and part of my schedule to try and get two very busy individuals to connect and also that we're halfway around the world opposite each other to get time.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

It has an effect.

[Robbie Kroger]

Ben, introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? What is your position in life?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Sure. Thank you. Yeah. And I'm Grateful to be here and looking forward to our conversation. I grew up in a home, like a science home. My father is a wildlife biologist who spent most of his life working on dingoes, which is Australia's largest predator. So the rest of the world might be familiar with lions or tigers or bears. Australia's biggest predator is a 15 kilo dog.

[Robbie Kroger]

So he worked very effective though as well, right? Oh yeah, super effective predator.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

It's a good predator. Like it, it does a, it does a lot of good things like very effective predator, but that's the largest we've got. And so my father grew up as a wildlife biologist specializing on dingo. So I just grew up doing this stuff. In fact, I went for a job interview many years ago in my 30s and I submitted as part of my resume a photo of me as a six year old working with the people that were interviewing me. And I put in my application that I had 25 years experience and submitted my photo.

[Robbie Kroger]

That's hilarious.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

And it got a good laugh. I didn't get the job, but it got a good laugh that we'd been doing this stuff for quite some time. So I just grew up in that space and went to uni, got the degrees and all that sort of thing. Started working as a wildlife scientist, pest, animal scientist in different fields. Cut my teeth out of university on insects and Sugarcane.

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[Dr. Ben Allen]

And doing experiments on how you stop insects from eating sugarcane, which is really good training and, and then went back to sort of the mammal side of things and working out in the bush, which I like the most. And since that time I've been working on dingoes almost exclusively for a decade. And then for the last.

[Robbie Kroger]

Geez, you took the old man's mantle up, huh?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

I just did it. Yeah, yeah, we, we, we're a tag team there for a while when dad was still at work. He's retired now and just spends his days fishing and I've broadened out and still do a lot of work on dingoes, but a lot of other stuff too. So after a decade at university, made my way to associate professor and ran the wildlife research group at the university. And now I'm in the.

[Robbie Kroger]

Which university is that, Ben? What university was that?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

University of Southern Queensland in Australia. There's roughly 30 odd unis. There's a handful of the big ones that most people would know that we call the Sandstone unis. And then there's a good couple dozen what they call regional universities that, that have a smaller sort of scope of the things that they do but they typically punch above their weight in the work that they do. And so I worked for one of those regional universities leading the wildlife research group there. Didn't do any teaching. We're just full time wildlife research on all sorts of different animals. And that allowed me to travel the world and do a whole bunch of things on all sorts of species and interact and that's where we land in a conversation like this. Because in the wildlife management space, not just straight up conservation or Biology or physiology, but in the actual management of these animals. A lot of the issues that we face in Australia are common around the world are all sorts of complex species. And it become apparent to me quite quickly that issues associated with killing animals for various reasons is always one of those hot button things. So we spent a lot of time in that space and we're doing that for a few years now.

[Robbie Kroger]

And you said you're in the private space now.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah, so now I left the university and work in the private sector for, for an environmental consultancy company and we do all the things. So sometimes you're spraying weeds or trapping feral animals and euthanasing them, sometimes you're doing research projects, you're radio tracking flying foxes or you're catching koalas or you're shooting feral pigs or whatever. So amazing. In that private sector space you can interact with, you know, government and industry in the sort of planning processes and stuff left legislative space. And then sometimes you get to do the fun stuff still and be outside. And I used to always joke with people that had the best job in the world which was get paid to go full driving, camping, fishing, hunting, sleeping under the stars. It's like you just, you're a little boy and you grow up and you're still getting paid to do it. So it's good fun.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah, it's funny, you, what you just mentioned your, your track is exactly very similar to mine. I became a professor. I was a professor for six years, literally just got tenure and left and I was hired to be the chief scientist of the BP oil spill from Texas to Florida. Stood up a billion dollar restoration framework on and really got an understanding of like whoa, this is how the world works. And this is like much, much higher level of politics and environmental restoration, environmental conservation ideas and work and, and policies. And then I got hired as a consultant. I was the chief scientist of an environmental consulting company and I did that for nine years. And yeah was, was in charge of building oyster reefs and re establishing dune systems and beneficial use of marsh material, of dredge material to build marshes back, buying land, habitat management and restoration of those lands for gopher, tortoises, longleaf pine savannahs.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

We do all those things our company. It's good fun. And the management side really interests me because it's not just the biology. You have to manage these animals in a way and then that means you got to pull in more than just wildlife. You have to pull in people and you got to pull in policy and you got to do all that stuff. And I was Very much interested in the applied, applied science, how you do these things, what the outcomes are of human intervention. Those are the things that interested me.

[Robbie Kroger]

Ben, when we first started interacting, you said to me, the reason you started to write these kinds of papers is you got sick and tired of being on the back foot. You got sick and tired of being like, why am I defending this thing that I know is true? Yeah, I. I need to, like, figure out my argument. And again, you know, you have this vision of who you're going to talk to and who he is and what he does. I assumed you were a professor of ethics, given what you just said. No, this is actually in my brain. Again, I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but in my brain, given all the work I've done, given the experience I've had Since I was 6 years old, I've seen this need for humans to be a part, not a part, a part of the system. We've been a part of the system for millennia. Or however, depending on, you know, how you see the world.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Humans were invented. We've been a part of it.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah, we've been a part of the system.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

And I don't know if you've read any one of the guys that reached out to you that when we had talked was John Nash and John Nash out of the uk. I don't know if you've read any of the stuff that he's done. He's got. He uses a cave as an example and how ethics are built within the cave. And when humans are in the cave, then you have these ethics that you have to sort of be aware of and think about. But when you step out of the cave, there are no effects any longer. Yeah. It's just the world that it is.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

We play sometimes. I do, like, some educational programs for schools, like from K through 12. And you do some wildlife management sessions. And we play what I call death games with the kids. And you say, who'd like to play some death games? And all the kids are like, yeah, yeah, we want to play some death games. And I sort of set the scene for them by saying, have you ever watched a documentary where you have an impala or a springbok or something running away and a lion's chasing them? And you go, who wants the lion to win? And half the class puts up their hands. They want the lion to win. You say, all right, well, if the lion wins, that springbok is going to die and it's going to die a very horrible death. It's going to get eaten by a lion. And you pause for a moment and there's like, well, that doesn't sound very nice. The kids, you go, well, who wants the springbok to win? And then the other half of the class puts up their hand and say, I want the springbok to win. All right, well, if the springbok gets away, that lion's going to starve. And those little baby cubs that you see, they're going to starve to death and they're going to die a very horrible death. And you pause for a second and then I make the point. Someone has to die. There's no scenario where everybody gets to live. Someone has to die. And this is Mother Nature. Someone has to die. So who wants to play some death games? And then they all scream and say, yes. And we play what we call Red Rover, where you have one person trying to tag the whole class and you fiddle with the numbers of how many taggers there are and how many runners there are. And you can teach people principles around predator, prey relationships. And if you have an unbalanced system, the game's no fun. So they learn very quickly how important it is to have predators and prey balanced. And if you have just one and not the other, it's not going to work. But we do that. We make that point. We call them death games. And I emphasize the fact that someone has to die because when they go out into the real world, this is what Mother Nature does. Somebody has to die. There's no scenario where everybody gets to live. And wildlife managers essentially have to play that game or orchestrate that game. Whether you're a farmer dealing with the animals on your farm, or whether you're a national park or reserve manager or a policy officer, you're playing these death games. You don't get to choose if animals live or die. You just have to choose which animals live or die and when and how. And that's the job of a wildlife manager. So I enjoy that space because it helps to, you know, conserve biodiversity, maintain ecosystems, and give animals a good life while they're alive.

[Robbie Kroger]

Ben, I know you've thought about this a lot. I, I, I think about this a lot too. So I don't want to bias and I don't think I would if in what I would say to what you think. But if, if, if I pushed you and said, why are we in this situation in which death is bad or death doesn't occur? It's not something that, no, that doesn't happen. Why are we here?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

I Haven't spent a lot of time in the. From a research point of view, haven't spent a lot of time in that space. But if I was to speculate, I would probably say it's got something to do with human populations becoming more urbanized over the years. And there's just a bit of a detachment from the reality of sort of nature. I'm not the first person to say that, and there's much more smarter people at me than that can talk about that kind of thing. But my sense is that we've just become a little bit disconnected from life and death. You know, it's. You only have to go back a generation. And our parents or grandparents would have been killing their own chickens on the farm or having a dairy cow that they used to milk, or maybe they went out hunting to get some meat or whatever. They still do that in a lot of places. Right. And I'm talking largely about Western cultures here because other cultures are still very connected to the land, but in sort of Western society at least, we become a little bit disconnected from that. And so just, you know, through no individual fault of their own, people just don't realize how sort of nature works as a generalization. I mean, there's funny YouTube clips of, you know, people not knowing that lemons come from lemon trees, you know, or that milk comes from female cows, you know, stuff like that. And you can watch, watch people who are. Who just didn't know these things. So I think probably a big part of it is that we've just become a little bit disconnected as a Western societies more generally. And you see that in people's sort of urge to connect with wildlife. Who doesn't love a great BBC documentary about wildlife? They're very popular. And when people see a little bird nesting on a high rise building in the middle of the city, everybody's all over it. They love it. So I think there's a sort of innate need to enjoy animals. A lot of people enjoy that stuff. But when it gets to the. The killing bit. Oh, we don't like that. That seems a bit rough. That doesn't look nice. In fact, one of the motivations. Well, there's a paper I wrote a couple of years ago around the reasons humans kill animals is what it points out is that every single human, regardless of where you live or what you eat or how you choose to live, you're a part of that food web. You can't get out of the food web. And even if you were the most vegan of vegans eating mushrooms and living in a cave, you're still taking up a cave that something else would have lived in and you're still eating something that something else would have eaten and you're killing them indirectly through competition. You just can't get out of that. Maybe when Elon Musk builds a planet, builds a space station, we might get out of the food web. But until that day, we are all stuck on this food web and we're involved, personally involved in animal killing. Directly or indirectly.

[Robbie Kroger]

What do you. There's two things that I think blend into it and I'm very aware of it, I'm very privy to it. I'm engaged in it 24 7. And you probably aren't as much in it as I am. I'm noticing in the social media now the whole, obviously the development and we're in this era of AI right now and this, this, this creation of these videos and these photos that are, are just if again from a practical perspective, like this is ludicrous. This, this doesn't make any sense. But it's, it's championing the narrative of, you know, a leopard has an impala fawn and raises it.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

And people, you go into the comments and it's like I've got a stock standard AI response on my phone now. Yeah, let's just plug it in. And I say AI is making us all dumber.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

You guys aren't thinking. There's no research, there's no is this real? Is this not real? You just hook line and sink up believing. Which in its microcosm of ar, which is now obviously very much larger than a microcosm. I think the thing that pushes me every day and I think pushes you to talk about the things that you talk about is the narrative that's coming out of these big non profits around the world of save the whatever.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

Polar bear, wolf, grizzly, elephant. Don't have to save the elephant anymore. We don't need to. You, you can't give an elephant away for free in South Africa right now.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah. Who would want one? Yeah. Yeah. Which is like in some ways they're well intentioned and there's a whole bunch of people who aren't well intentioned. But let's, let's be generous and say they're well intentioned. Nobody wants to see animals hurt or whatever. And it's coming from a good place. The trouble with that kind of thinking though, when, when the pendulum swings too far, it's actually very bad for fauna and it's bad for wildlife and will it has a, a negative consequence. That means you will not get the thing that you achieve because animals have to die. It's that, it's that rule. You cannot live in a world where they don't die. So by taking away, you think of that lion, Springbok thing. By saving one, you're killing the other. You just can't get out of that. And there's, there's, there's no way around it. It's the, like, it's the laws of physics. You, you can do all you want. There's so, there's even moves, like across the world to. And I don't know, sometimes I feel like they're tongue in cheek or they're just philosophers hypothesizing. But you dig a bit deeper and you're like, no, no, there's really support behind these things where they want to herbivorize predators, genetically engineer them.

[Robbie Kroger]

I had them on the podcast. I had them on the podcast and I was like, guys, I had them on the podcast just to like, let's have this ludicrous discussion.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah, all right. So to the extent that they achieve what they want, bye bye lions. Bye bye leopards. Bye bye. Everything that eats meat, the biodiversity you're trying to conserve will disappear. The only reason a leopard looks like a leopard is because it eats other things. If you made it eat sheep, it would not look like a leopard, it would look like a sheep. So the teeth would disappear, the spots would disappear, the long legs would disappear. Like, it wouldn't be a leopard. So if your objective is to preserve biodiversity or the animals that you see out there right now, that's the objective that you want to keep. You can't do something like that. We'll all just be sheep. Or there's, there's people who speculate that there'll only be three animals left. Humans, sheep and wheat, or something like the only three organisms left in the environment. If you go down this road so you just, again, society may choose that they want to avoid the harm is a higher priority than preserving biodiversity. And you're like, okay, if you want to go down that road, you can have a harm free place, but you will not have biodiversity. You won't have the species and animals and plants that you see. If you want to keep those things, you have to have harm or death or killing or the pain and suffering that goes with it. There's this other talk I give every now and again, like a seminar called why Animals Must Die and Humans Should Kill Them, an intentionally provocative title, I suppose. But I would say so. But again, it's trying to point out that animals have to die and why they should die and why humans should be involved in it. And one of the, we call them the four arguments. One of the arguments in there is what we call the evolutionary argument, which is you just, you have to have these forces like this lion, impala, predator, prey type stuff. You have to have these forces operating in order to generate the speciation or the great diversity that we see in life. And species grow horns because they're trying to defend from a predator. A predator gets long legs and sharp teeth because they're trying to get past the horns. And the predator and prey are always in this arms race over avoiding predation or being able to get past the defenses. So that's the only reason species exist, is because of the harm and the killing that occurs. Now if you take away that or you try to separate that, because we're worried about the harm. And we do this in conservation programs all the time and plenty in Australia where you put up a big fence and you'll get rid of the predators and you try and encourage the endangered species on the inside to grow. And they do quite well in the absence of predation. And as soon as they get moved outside the fence, they get vacuumed up by predators because they haven't learned to deal with the harm.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

And they just get eaten. And so now research in that part of like in that discipline is around. How can we introduce a little bit of harm to train these guys so that when they go out into the wide world they know how to deal with a predator. Short, like to put a, a full stop on that point. You have to have the harm, you have to have the killing.

[Robbie Kroger]

Well, even, even with, with cheaters.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Right.

[Robbie Kroger]

So we just did a, a massive, we probably did the, we did the world's largest cheetah relocation project last year as a nonprofit. Amazing. 17 cheetah from South Africa to Mozambique. The cheetah we wanted were lion savvy cheetahs, because they weren't. They're like, oh, hey, don't worry about, we don't know what you are, but we're going to keep eating. Well, no lion's going to come and smack you, kill you and eat you and the prey item that you had.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah. So you need it. If you take away the harm and the killing and the, you know, the pain and the suffering part out of the story, you lose species. So I fear that a big push towards, you know, risk aversion or harm aversion we don't want animals to be stressed or hurt or whatever ultimately leads in species extinctions and loss of biodiversity. So we have to find a way society to live with that and be comfortable with that. Now, that's not to say that, you know, these are things that just cut large. You go do what you want to animals. That's certainly not what we're suggesting, but you got to be comfortable with death and killing and the pain that goes along with that and the suffering that goes along with that, because it's just how the world works.

[Robbie Kroger]

Ben, what made you. I want to. I want to dig in a little bit to understand, like, I already mentioned that you just got sick and tired of being on the defensive and decided to go on the offensive. What made you go down this. This sort of challenging of the ethics route? Because really, nobody, let's be honest, nobody had ever decided to challenge that. Right. Everyone was like, whoa, I don't want to get into this ethics argument because how can I actually defend from an ethics perspective, killing something.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah. What was obvious to me was that welfare was being used as a Trojan horse for ethical arguments. So we essentially say, oh, it's about the welfare we don't want you to use. In Australia, common debate is around poison, 1080 use for control of dingoes, wild dogs, foxes and cats. We use poison, we throw it out. Not with reckless abandon, but we throw out a lot of 1080 in Australia. And people say, we don't like that, and say, all right, well, let's not use 1080. How about I just shoot them in the head? I'll do a bullet in the head. No, no, no, we don't want that either. You're like, well, what do you mean? I just gave it perfect welfare, lights out, instantly. Didn't feel a thing. Objectively, perfect welfare. Well, no, no, I don't want you to shoot it. I just don't want you to kill it in the first place. Yeah, okay, well, now we're having an ethics argument. We're not having a welfare. You're not really interested in welfare most of the time. A lot of the time it's not a welfare issue. We're interested in an ethical issue. I just don't want you to kill it. Factory farming, that sort of stuff, it's not about killing the animal. It's. I just don't want you to have the animal in the first place. You shouldn't be eating it. So you. All the efforts, you know, factory farming might do to improve welfare for animals are not going to satisfy someone who's ethically opposed to you eating the animal in the first place. So there's a big distinction between ethics and welfare. And I could see people having welfare arguments with each other and not winning or no one winning. Like, it's just a big argument, because what they're not talking about is the underlying ethics behind it, which is where they're coming from. And as a wildlife manager, we're always providing advice to government on how you do this or how you do that and what's the most appropriate management strategies. And one of the things wildlife managers collectively have sucked at and still do is we haven't given managers and policymakers what I would call the ethical tools to defend or support those practices. So when a decision maker is getting bombarded by a group of people who've seen something stupid on TikTok, the decision maker has got nothing to go back to defend or support those practices. And the wildlife managers of the world were saying, well, we need to do this to save the rhino or save the shorebirds or whatever. But that argument is not flying with a public who are not speaking that ethical language. They're speaking a different ethical language. So I started to realize that if we're to support best practice wildlife, which leads to good biodiversity conservation, if those tool. If we're, if we're not going to lose the tools that are available to us to do that, and we want to preserve species, we're going to have to engage in these ethical debates or whatever and justify the practices or point out why these things are ethical or whatever, otherwise we risk losing the argument. And if you risk losing the argument, we're going to lose species.

[Robbie Kroger]

So obviously is. It's a much. It's quite a daunting. Field.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

To dive into as a wildlife manager, obviously, us going through graduate school, we don't. You don't. You don't get a class in ethics. You know, you. You almost have to explore it on your own. And when you start looking at things like, you know, consequentialism and I don't even know how to say it. Corrected deontology. Right.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

I'll just stop right there. Like, I don't even understand those two terms.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

So, like, how am I supposed to argue if I can't even understand the terms?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

That's right. And in, you know, with respect to those, they're philosophical fields in their own right. There's people who get PhDs and doctorates and spend their whole careers just in one of those fields, debating and discussing and philosophizing. About what that field means, let alone taking two different fields and putting them together or taking eight, which is what we did, and then applying it to this question of killing. So it's a very complex space. That's what philosophers do, they philosophize. So I found that to be important. I'll give you example, like a concrete example of where the rubber hits the road for this topic. So a common thing across islands is you'll have some sort of invasive pest, like a cat or a rat or a goat or something wiping out some sort of animal on an island. And often what will happen is you'll get an invasive species pop in and managers will launch into action and say, well, we need to get rid of this smaller number of invasive species in order to save the larger number of shorebirds or reptiles or whatever it is that they're trying to protect. So what would happen is they'd say, well, we want to throw out poison or shoot some or do whatever to get rid of the, let's say the rats. We want to get rid of the rats to save the shorebirds. And then an animal rights type person or some other type of philosophy, conservation philosophy, would come along and say, but you're violating the rights of the rat, like you're doing bad things to this rat. How can you justify that? It's cruel, it's unethical, blah, blah, blah. And so they would make essentially a claim that would say it's cruel or unethical to do this thing to the rat. And then the wildlife manager would respond with saying something like, well, I have to kill these 100 rats in order to save the 1,000 shorebirds. It's a net benefit of 900 animals. And that answer would be unsatisfactory to the person who said, you shouldn't be doing this to the rat. And what's happening there philosophically is someone is coming along with an animal rights based ethic to say you're violating the rights of the rat. And the wildlife manager is responding with a consequentialist based ethic, which is just like maths and saying, but the net benefit of this is good. But neither of those two, they're speaking different ethical languages and they're not reaching agreement or understanding amongst each other. So my thought was, well, rather than have people talking over each other with different ethical languages, how about we make a case or show how under each of these ethical philosophies you can make an argument to support intentional animal killing under that philosophy. So next time when they say we don't like you killing the rats. You could say, well, which ethical philosophy are you coming from? I'm coming from this one. All right, well, then I'll give you a response based inside that ethical philosophy. There's my rationale. And then at least you're speaking the same language and you might be able to make some progress.

[Robbie Kroger]

So this paper that I reached out to you on, it's called the Ethical Arguments that Support Intentional Animal Killing. Well, I think the most impressive thing to start with about this article is the fact that you have 47 co authors from all over the world. You know, people that have been on this podcast before, Janetta Celia have been. Sam Shepard have been on this podcast. Sam Ferreira is about to be on this podcast.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Well, say hello to him for me.

[Robbie Kroger]

I will. How did that come about, that you've got the. All these guys that are like, no, unbelievably pulling in the same direction?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Well, unsurprisingly, wildlife managers are not the only people grappling with this issue. People involved in medicine and animal use, in medicine and sort of human research, medical research, dealing with this issue. People in agriculture, supplying food to the world deal with this issue. People in the sort of religious space and animals used for like, ritual slaughter or some sort of religious exercise, they deal with this issue. Wildlife managers, conservationists, all sorts of people, zoos and veterinarians, deal with the issue. What do I do with this animal? I've got a. I've got a white rhino. Do I kill it or do I patch it up and get it back out there? Like every. There's lots of people involved in animal use industries or fields that interact with animals that deal with this issue of killing animals. And there is a distinction to be made between. Well, in the ethics philosophy world, they make the distinction between intentional animal killing. So I go out there with a gun and shoot something versus unintentional animal killing, which is, I don't know if I build a house and chase away all the animals that lived on my patch of ground. It wasn't intentional, but it happened anyway. They draw the distinction. So we specifically tried to focus on the intentional forms, which are the forms that get everybody upset the most. And when you do that, you realize there are people all over the world in all sorts of disciplines who are dealing with all the same stuff. And I felt that it was important to reach out to as many as possible to be involved, because I don't know everything. And the things that I think are important may not be important in the other side of the world. So I wanted to test the limits of sort of my own knowledge and experience with things as well. So that when you put all of it together, you've got something that's broadly applicable and not something that's hyper focused on, you know, an issue that's not important to everybody. So I think for me, did it

[Robbie Kroger]

just, did it like spider web, like you knew maybe like 10 of them and you're like, hey, would you be interested in this paper? Do you know anybody else would be interested in this paper?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

And just went, absolutely, yeah. So this ethics one is sort of part two of the killing one, which we did in 2023. At that time we got a bunch of authors all over the place and when we started to build out that first paper, we always imagined having, you know, part A and part B, but as if an interesting story. This one from 2023, I started out with six reasons humans kill animals. And then you bring other people on, you're like, oh yeah, we really need to add a seventh. That's different. We really need to add an eighth. Oh yeah, that's different.

[Robbie Kroger]

And it went out to 10, ended up with 10.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

And, and then someone even said number 11 and I'm like, man, this is never going to stop. We got to stop at a 10. But if we had an 11th, it would have been political killing, which is just killing animals purely for the sake of politics, just to appease somebody else for no other reason. You're just doing it to appease somebody else. And there's examples of that too. But we started with the 10 reasons and that built a network of people. And then when it come time to finishing off part B of that exercise, which is this ethics paper, I said to everybody, hey, reach out to everybody in your own networks. We don't want to be an echo chamber of people who feel the same way about things. And we. A lot of the debates that readers would probably have in their own head when they read our paper, we had amongst our co authorship as well. There's people in there that are right in on their hunting and there's people in there that are very opposed to hunting. There's quite a diverse mix of people in that ethical group, but. Sorry, in that authorship group, but one thing they all agree on is the principles and things that we outline in these papers. So I think having a large co author group is sort of testament to the broadness of the issue and to the sort of commonalities amongst people with different backgrounds and different views. We're not all the Same on that thing, but we are all the same in our sort of passion or interest in getting this stuff. Right.

[Robbie Kroger]

So in this last paper in 2025, and we'll link this in the show, notes the ethical arguments that support intentional animal killing. You sort of set out that there's really eight frameworks.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

There's lots more than that. It looks like, yeah, there's plenty of ethical philosophies and views on how the world works. And if you interviewed everybody, you'd probably find out there's about 8 billion different ethical philosophies. Everybody's a little bit different. Right. But you can group like minded people into various forms of ethics or philosophies or frameworks, depending on what you want to call it. And so we used eight things that people would be familiar with. Animal rights is something that people be familiar with, or virtue ethics is certainly very popular. People be familiar with that. Environmental ethics, you know, it's the whole system that's important. Humans and animals all together. And then there's religious stuff as well. There are billions of people in the world who derive their morals from their religious beliefs. You can't ignore that. That's how many societies and the majority of Earth's population view things through a religious lens. So we took a bunch of these and said, all right, well how can we make an argument to support intentional animal killing under each of these? And we created some examples of those arguments. I hesitate to say it's not like Frodo's ring. It's not like one ring to rule them all. And if you had just the right arguments, you could beat every other argument. It's not like that. It's more just to point out that when someone says that's unethical, I don't like what you're doing, that's unethical. The response should be, well, maybe to you or maybe under that circumstance, or maybe under that philosophy, but maybe it is ethical under a different philosophy or a different framework or different time and place. And if we live in a world where you do have this sort of multiverse of ethical views, what do we do? What, what do we do then? Can I tell you that you can't do something? Can I go to Africa and tell someone in Botswana who is barely, has got no electricity and no running water and is eating off the land? Can I tell them that they can't kill the elephant? Like, what do you get when now two different philosophies clash? Which one's right? Is the Jew right or is the Muslim right? Is the animal rights person right or is the virtue ephesus right? There is no right or wrong right. There's just different ways of looking at it. And so the pr, the wildlife manager says, all right, can we move past all this and move forward towards something we agree on, which is usually something around welfare? You know, we want animals to have a good life while they're alive. Most people, unless you're a psychopath, want animals to have a good life while they're alive. We can all agree on that.

[Robbie Kroger]

Right? Right. Right. In your. If, you know, we. We could absolutely go through all of the eight, but I think in. In your experience, you know, we've already talked about one as an example earlier. The consequentialism argument or the consequentialist ethic. Give me some more. Give me an example. We've already. Give me. Let's just talk a little bit more about consequentialism. And then maybe if there's one or two others that you're just like, man, you know, this is what comes up more. I guess maybe what I'm trying to get is what are the common things? Because there's going to be. Of the eight, hey, these four, you see this a lot more than these four, right?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

In the wildlife field, specifically, to me, I think there's three that kind of stand out, or four. Sorry, there's four that stand out in that sort of wildlife conservation sort of space. One of them is environmental ethics. The other is consequentialism. One is deontology, or what is popularly known as animal rights, and the other is what we would call virtue ethics. And I'll explain a little bit in summary for each one. Environmental ethics is really about prioritizing the sort of collective environment as a whole. What's good for the land is an acceptable thing to do. So if it means taking out some rats on an island and that's good for the rest of the corner and floor on the island, well, then that's okay. It's got to be good for the environment, or at the very least, not harmful to the environment. But if it's something that is harmful to the environment, like, I don't know, tipping some toxic waste into the river, environmental ethics is not going to support that. It's not good for the environment. But the distinguishing feature there is that

[Robbie Kroger]

you're taking that different. How is environmental ethics ethical argument different from a consequentialist argument? They seem very, very close.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Well, you've touched on something that we talk about in here, is they all end up in the same place, which is permission to engage in intentional animal killing. They are very close. It's just that their. Their rationale is different. So I don't know, you type in into Google Maps, how do I drive to New York or how do I drive to Alice Springs? It'll give you three different options and you can take three different routes to get to the same place. That's what the sort of ethics is. What we tried to show here is you can take multiple pathways and arrive in the same place, but the distinguishing feature for environmental ethics is that it prioritizes the group of organisms, the collective ecosystem, over the individual parts, not just

[Robbie Kroger]

the bird that you mentioned as an example. From the consequentialist perspective.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah. You need to take everything into consideration, plants and animals and people for that matter, because we're a part of those systems. Consequentialist is best thought of as dispassionate. Pure maths. If I have to take out 100 rats to save a thousand shorebirds, that's a net benefit of 900 animals. The maths works out great. If I have to kill a small number of predators on a sheep or cattle station in order to save large numbers of sheep or cattle, that's totally acceptable. It's the consequences that matter most, which is why it's called consequentialism. And it really comes back to that just sort of calculation, if for this amount of harm or killing I'm doing, is there a net benefit with those things? And most of the Western world's policy frameworks, legislative frameworks, they don't state this, but they revolve around consequentialism. If I have to get an animal ethics permit is what we call them in Australia. But if you're doing some sort of research, you'll often have to get a permit from somewhere. That committee is tasked with assessing if I'm going to harm these animals in this way, is it worth doing it? Is the. Is the benefit of this research worth the harm you're doing? They're operating under a consequentialist framework.

[Robbie Kroger]

No, it's exactly. For instance, we have an example right now with the Utah Department of Natural Resources. They had already sort of removed all regulations associated with mountain lion harvest. Mountain lion take. But now they went three steps forward in. In a number of watersheds and have now engaged predator removal specialists to go into those specific watersheds. No seasons, no take. Do whatever you want, however you want, with the consequence, with the hope that the consequences. A better mule population.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah. The managers may. Yeah. So managers may say, all right, we. You think of my. My Death Games. The managers are saying, we want to tip the balance in favor of the prey. That's the management decision. And they're enacting some sort of actions to try and achieve that outcome. And they, like, from a management point of view, you can almost be sort of ambivalent or whatever about what your objective is. That's their objective, or if that's your objective now you've got a bunch of tools available to you to achieve that objective. Well, which one are you going to use? Well, we're going to send everybody in with guns. All right, okay. That's your objective. So the consequence part is, philosophically, the mechanics work differently to environmental ethics because consequentialism doesn't necessarily care about the environment per se. They just care about the mass. Is there going to be a net benefit from this thing? And if you can demonstrate a net benefit, then it's morally good.

[Robbie Kroger]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Deontology is very different, or animal rights is very different. It's about rights and duties. Some things have certain rights, and then other things have duties to respect those rights. So we might say that the elephant in Botswana has a right to life. Humans have a duty to respect that right. So if I go and kill that elephant or harm it in some way, I'm violating its right, and I'm violating my duty. I'm not living up to my duty. And so whether or not something is morally right or wrong depends on whether or not people with duties or animals with duties are respecting the rights of others. And in that world, and people, readers or listeners will be familiar to this, is that people in that space often want to give animals the same rights that humans have. A right to life, a right to freedom, a right to safety, freedom from stress, all those sorts of things. And so if to the extent that you do that and you grant animals all those rights, humans now then have a duty to respect that right. So they would say that I can't just walk into the bush and shoot an elephant or a mountain lion or whatever because I'm violating that animal's rights. Even if it had good consequences and even if it was fine for the environment, you're still doing the wrong thing. Morally. Virtue ethics is separate.

[Robbie Kroger]

Sorry, just before we get on to virtue ethics.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

How in. In the world that you've lived, live in. And creating the counterargument to say under these various ethical philosophies, there is support for intentional killing in some cases.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah.

[Robbie Kroger]

I would feel that the deontological argument seems to be the hardest to justify from an intentional killing perspective.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

It depends on the scenario. So there's a lot of nuance in all of these and I'm sure you could find some very, you know, the gray haired professors of philosophy that teach in each of these things and they will give you a counter view, which is expected. Right. Because even within each of these philosophies, there's a lot of debate around the limits of the rules that they impose or the principles and where they apply. So again, this is that Frodo's ring? I'm not saying this is Frodo's ring. I'm just saying that you can make an argument under these philosophies for some of these actions.

[Robbie Kroger]

So what would be the argument for intentional. What would be the argument for intentional killing under the deontological ethic?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah, so one of the example that we gave in here was where we have, it's called the Mini Ride principle. There's kind of two principles that are most useful inside animal epics. Sorry, inside deontology. For us, the Mini Ride principle is more just saying. I'll use an example. It's probably highlight a little bit better.

[Robbie Kroger]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

In the literature they give the example of a bunch of miners trapped underground and you need to go rescue the trapped miners underground. You say, all right, it's going to, it's going to take, we have to kill one person to get the other 49 out. There's 50 miners underground, one of them's got to die to get out. And the Mini Ride principle is really just an attempt to say it's better to kill one and save the many, or kill a small number and save the many than it is to let all the many die just to avoid the one. But there's a catch, and it's an important catch is when everyone is going to die. So the case of the miners, they're all going to die. That conclusion is a given. So given that conclusion, we kill 1 and save 49 or we don't kill the 1 and save the other. The Mini Ride principle essentially says it's better to kill the one and save the 49 when they're all going to die. Now if you're to try and apply that to wildlife management, we can be tempted to just stop at the first half and say killing a few saves many. That's a consequentialist argument. And, and often we can't forget if I'm applying a deontological point of view that the second part of that principle is very important, which is when they're all going to die. So it might have greater application for a place like on an island where if you let the invasive species go, it really will wipe out everything. Or in a predator prey scenario, where you have a particular predator that's going to eat every single one of your prey, it really will kill them all. But it might not apply to things like trophy hunting or something like. Or some other form of intentional killing, and we describe this in the paper, is that there are limits to these principles and where they can be applied. It's not that the mini road principle always applies to every form of killing, but there'll be some where it does. And I think for policymakers, decision makers, understanding the limits of those underneath each framework is important. So if I'm going to write a policy or a piece of legislation or a management plan that says I'm going to do this, I would want to do an assessment of these to know which prints, which philosophies are in my corner and which philosophies are not in my corner. And, you know, where you're likely to get shade from and where you're not going to get shade from.

[Robbie Kroger]

Okay, sorry. Virtue ethics.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Virtue ethics is, in some ways, it's a bit sort of fluffy. It's how you feel. Virtue ethics is more about your feelings. And so to live consistently with virtue ethics, you need to do things that are consistent with the virtues honesty, integrity, charity. There's mercy, justice. There's a whole bunch of different virtues in the animal space. We often talk about compassion and mercy. We want to treat animals compassionately. The example given in the philosophical literature for mercy, sorry for virtue ethics, is picture yourself back in the Second World War and you're hiding some Jews in your basement and the Nazis come along and say, do you have any Jews in your basement? Now, if I'm a virtue ethicist and I'm trying to be honest and I'm putting honesty at the top of my list of virtues, I would say, yes, I have Jews in my basement, and now those Jews are going to die, and I'm going to die, too. So being honest in that case leads to a great amount of harm. The virtuous thing to do in that scenario would be to lie or to violate that virtue and say, no, I don't have Jews, because then it leads to no harm or a better welfare outcome. So one of the things that's really important to understand about virtue ethics is there are no hard, fast rules like Animal rights. In virtue ethics, there's always exceptions to the rule where it might be more virtuous to not follow honesty or compassion. A good example is an animal with a broken leg on the side of the road or a busted wing or something. What am I going to do? Say I'm going to be compassionate and walk away and I'm not going to kill it? Or are we going to be compassionate and say, oh, I'm going to kill you. I'm sorry, I might not have all the right veterinary drugs and tools. I'm just going to go find a rock. It's not going to be great, but it's better than dying over the next three days. So you would, out of compassion, you would do something harmful. And you can apply that principle to lots of different scenarios where you're motivated by compassion to minimize harm.

[Robbie Kroger]

Okay.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

And lastly, well, you can see with all of these virtue ethics, I'm motivated by.

[Robbie Kroger]

We got the four. That's right, we got the four. Yep.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Yeah. Motivated by compassion to minimize harm and it ends up with the dead bird on the side of the road. Or through deontology, I might say, well, all of these animals on this island are going to die if I don't do something about it. I'm justified in doing something about it. Environmental ethics would say, well, I can do something about those rats on the island too. And the consequentialist would certainly say the same thing. So I can get there through multiple routes that all of that all arrive. Now what that does to me is it almost in some way says ethics is not important. Let's just bypass the ethics then. If we know we're all going to get to the same place. And now let's have a debate about what's the right tool to use. Which tool is the least harmful? Do I use poison? Do I use guns? Do I push them all off cliff into the water?

[Robbie Kroger]

And the least. And the least harmful is not an ethics question. It's a welfare question.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

It's a welfare question. It's not about ethics because we already, we, we would have already gone through the process to know that I'm justified in doing something. Now let's have a discussion about what is the least harmful way to achieve this. And everybody can agree on that. We all want to do that. Nobody wants to be most harmful. So if I have a choice of two bullets and let's say I want to shoot an elephant, well, I can get a big caliber rifle and shoot it in the head, or I can get a small caliber rifle and shoot it in the knee, it's still going to die. But I wouldn't be justified in blowing its leg off or blowing its mouth off, even though I'm achieving the same outcome, which is ethically justified, which is to kill the elephant. So where you've got a choice of two tools and one hurts more and one hurts less, I'm not going to be justified in using the one that hurts less, even though I have ethical permission, if you like, to kill it in the first place. So I think debate should focus on the tools that we use and whether or not they're effective in the sense of reducing the harm, the management objectives, rather than getting into arguments about ethics, which just goes nowhere because everybody's got a different philosophy.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah, no, it's fascinating. It really, really is. And I think it's. It's conversations like these that people can listen to. And also like that podcast you sent, which was fast, which was amazing, that the AI generated that, that, that summary number one, and then two people and the AI obviously generated the summary of there's person A and person B talking to each other and broke it down so simply that I was like, man, okay, I don't have to be scared about deal ontological ethical arguments, which I am, and most people are, and consequentialist is ethical argument.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Put the link to it. I actually, in your chat, I actually found that really useful. So I didn't compare that a reader who read the paper, I don't know, maybe he didn't want to read the whole paper. So he did an AI summary of my paper in the form of this 15 minute podcast between two fictitious people. And they sent it to me and said, is this accurate? You know, has it done? Has it explained what he was trying to say?

[Robbie Kroger]

So brilliant.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Perfect, right? Perfect. And in fact, side note, I list as I was listening to it, because I listened to a lot of podcasts. As I was listening to it, I forgot almost what it was. And I thought I was listening to two people having a conversation about my paper. And when you work in a space like this, you get misrepresented and mischaracterized all the time. So as I was listening to this podcast, this fake podcast, I'm thinking, man, these two people have really understood what I was trying to say. They have really. They haven't misquoted me, they haven't mischaracterized my arguments. They're doing a very good job having a discussion. And then it wasn't until the end, I'm like, oh, Wait, of course they didn't misquote me. It's me that they're talking. Like that's speaking in a different voice. Like it's, it's very believable and it's scary where the AI stuff's going these days. It's a very.

[Robbie Kroger]

Were the people AI too?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

It's all just made up. It's all just like animation. I don't know what, what.

[Robbie Kroger]

Oh, dude, like I, like you even had totally fake. Because I thought the woman and the guy talking were actual real people.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

No, no, it's Siri talking to whoever. Like they're just. It's robots. Like it's just computers talking to each other. It just sounds real. Oh, man, we're going to be out of a job. I don't need to go to a conference and explain things anymore. I just need to attach an AI summary to every paper that's written and

[Robbie Kroger]

we won't have this podcast that's coming for sure. 100% that's coming actually.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

It's actually as a method of distilling the content of a scientific paper. It's a very powerful tool. It's a very powerful tool. Puts it into the hands of the layperson. It's really cool.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah, we'll definitely try and put that link in the show. Notes. Ben, man, I appreciate this. I know this is probably not going to last be the last time that you are on this podcast and I hope you're interested in coming back. And I know you sent me like 30 minutes before us get jumping on this podcast article that you got published in Shooting Australia or Shooter Australia or something about your young boy shooting, you know, coming into, coming into hunting using a tutu, just like you had, just like your father had taught you. You were teaching your boy now, right?

[Dr. Ben Allen]

You know, many years ago I sat next to Norman Owen Smith, a Godfather legend.

[Robbie Kroger]

Excuse me.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

You know him, right?

[Robbie Kroger]

Excuse me. Listen, okay, I. I was in the eco, the zoology department being taught by Norman Owen Smith. And now I'm on an email chain with Norman Owen Smith as a 40, you know, 45 year old ecologist. I'm like, Norman and I are debating each other. This is awesome.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

So I happen to be sitting next to Norman catching the crumbs that fell off his table while we were having a conversation about all this sort of stuff a few years ago and he said something to me that was very profound. We're talking about hunting and, you know, killing animals. And he said, what's not natural about a human walking across the Savannah and killing an animal, what's not natural about that? That is the most natural thing. You know, people have been walking across the savannah killing animals since people and animals were invented. It is the most natural thing. Now you can have a debate around, you know, throwing poisons out of helicopters, that's unnatural. Or often in hunting you have a debate around, oh, it's too easy because you've got a gun. Everybody should go back to a spear and, you know, put the odds a bit more better. Like you can have those sorts of discussions. But as far as an ethical discussion around, is it acceptable to kill an animal? What's not natural about that? So you're right. I think there's a lot of discussions to be had around the 10 reasons that we give for people killing animals and about the ethical justifications for each of those reasons and how we can live in a world where we have need to get more comfortable with ethics and welfare and stuff, because there's no way of getting out of it. We're in it.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah, it's, you know, you brought something up in this, in, in what you just said that we. It's. If you had to ask me, Robbie, like, break down, what's the top three things that you get when you talk about like defending hunting or defending sustainable use of wildlife? You know, you hit one of them, which was, why don't you make it more fair on the animal and remove the high powered weapon and go back to using a spear, a knife or your hands. And often those individuals are your animal rights kind of individuals that have not given any thought to their, their welfare, justification of what they're asking you to do. And my response to them, it's crazy. My response to them is, hey, I, we have a rifle to be as efficient and effective in our killing as possible. So you're suggesting to me that you want me to inflict more pain now? You want me to inflict more suffering.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Do you want to go back to clubbing seals or are you happy with shooting around? Do you want to go back with 50 people with spears bringing down an elephant or are you happy with just one shot? We see this, right, and it illustrates the difference between the ethics and the welfare. Let's say you were having a good conversation with someone who felt that way and you said, all right, I'm going to go back to the club then, or I'll go back to the spear. And what you'll quickly find is they go, no, no, no, no, I don't want you to kill it. And that's because they're using welfare as a Trojan horse for an ethical argument, which is I don't want you to kill it. So I've tried, at least in some part to bypass ethics by saying, you know, you're never going to get out of these ethics arguments. We both agree on good welfare. How about we shift towards good welfare? Because I can hold hands with you on that one. I don't want to see someone bring down an elephant with 50 spears. If they need to bring down an elephant, we'll do it nicely.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah, Agree.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Most people would be in that corner.

[Robbie Kroger]

Yeah, agreed. Well, my man, I'll let you go. I know you're it's almost the middle of the day for you. It is closing in on getting savages in baths and beds and stuff like that on my end. But man, I appreciate you. I really appreciate you coming on here. I look forward to us interacting much more in the future.

[Dr. Ben Allen]

Definitely happy to do it anytime. Always a pleasure.

[Robbie Kroger]

Well, that's it for today. I appreciate you listening. As always, leave a review, share it with your friends and most importantly, do what's right to convey the truth Around

[Dr. Ben Allen]

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