A billboard campaign by Ontario trappers to raise public appreciation of their role in wildlife management has so far been well received. Now the organisation behind the campaign, the Ontario Fur Managers Federation (OFMF), is optimistic a national campaign can follow.

From September 5 to October 14, the OFMF has six billboards on show near high-traffic border crossings to the US. The message on the billboards is simple, but thought-provoking: “In Ontario, trappers work to maintain healthy wildlife populations for today and the future.”

The idea, explains Robin Horwath, who retired this August after 12 years as OFMF’s general manager, is that discussion of this key message will lead to discussion of other important aspects of trapping. These include protecting habitat, property and infrastructure, controlling the spread of diseases, and of course, supplying consumers with beautiful, sustainable and natural furs.

SEE ALSO: Robin Horwath – Trappers are “great stewards of the land”. Truth About Fur.

“Wildlife managers and conservationists have always appreciated the important work trappers do, and call on us to help all the time,” explains Horwath, a third-generation trapper from Blind River. “But among the general public, there are many misunderstandings about what we do. In the first stage of this campaign, we hope to generate interest in local media, and use that as a platform to explain ourselves better.”

The response so far has been encouraging. As of this writing, the campaign has been covered by SooToday of Sault Ste. Marie, Windsor News Today, TBnewswatch of Thunder Bay, Timmins Today, the program Superior Morning on CBC Radio, and CTV News (click on the image below to view).

“If this campaign succeeds in raising the understanding and acceptance of trapping among Ontarians, we hope other trapping associations will be inspired to follow suit, and we’ll have a national campaign going,” says Horwath.

Modern Traps Are Humane

So in what ways are trappers currently misunderstood?

“Over the years, many misconceptions and outdated information have been spread when it comes to trapping,” explains Lauren Tonelli, also a third-generation trapper and Horwath’s replacement as general manager of the OFMF. “A lot of this comes from a place of ignorance about trapping, which is what we are trying to correct. However, there are groups that are anti-trapping that spread this misinformation in an attempt to sway people’s opinions against trappers. One of the major pieces of misinformation being spread around is that trappers still use inhumane steel-jawed leghold traps, and that animals lose feet in them trying to escape. This is simply not true.”

“Steel-jawed legholds have been banned for decades,” she continues. “In fact, the modern equivalents are foothold traps, with padded offset jaws and swivels that can also be used for relocating live animals.”

In support of her claim, she points to the website of the Fur Institute of Canada, which has been at the forefront of developing humane traps since it was established in 1983. Here can be found illustrated lists of all the trap types currently certified under the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards (AIHTS).

“Canadian trappers are bound by AIHTS on what types of traps they can use,” says Tonelli, “which are certified and specifically designed to restrain an animal humanely, until the trapper arrives, or designed to kill the animal instantly. What you will not find are the steel-jawed leghold traps described by anti-trapping groups.”

Reducing Disease, Starvation

Another misconception that the OFMF wants to dispel is that all wildlife populations are just fine on their own and don’t need any sort of management.

Wildlife populations fluctuate in response to several factors, including changes in food supply, how many predators there are, habitat and climate, and without human intervention, these fluctuations can be extreme.

“The way that populations regulate themselves without intervention consists of starvation, predation, and disease,” says Tonelli. “When wildlife populations become overabundant, they are much more prone to disease outbreaks. We all understand how crowded groups of people lead to spread of disease, and it is no different in animals. This can lead to massive die-offs and significant population declines. Additionally, animal populations can grow to a point where there is not enough available food to go around, which also leads to crashes in the population. Trappers help to maintain consistent, sustainable populations that are not reaching levels where disease spread is rampant, and starvation occurs.”

SEE ALSO: Does wildlife need to be managed? Ontario Fur Managers Federation.

Other key points the OFMF is keen to discuss are:

• Sustainability: Fur is a renewable natural resource, unlike synthetic materials like polyester. Fur garments can be restyled and repaired, and after decades of use, biodegrade rather than clogging landfills.
• Property and infrastructure damage: Beavers are believed to be more numerous in Ontario today than ever before, but they must be managed. Beavers can destroy woodlands, and their dams can flood homes, roads and fields.
• Saving taxpayers’ money: By helping wildlife managers, trappers also reduce the cost of management to taxpayers.
• Controlling livestock predation: Trappers are often asked by livestock farmers to control predation by coyotes. Particularly vulnerable are calves and lambs.

For further information, or to arrange an interview with an OFMF representative, please contact general manager Lauren Tonelli at 705-542-4017 or [email protected].

SEE ALSO: Fur fights back. Ontario trappers launch new public education campaign. Truth About Fur.

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The fact that several high-profile clothing companies recently stopped using fur in the name of "sustainability" -- not to speak of political bans on the sale of fur products in California -- highlights the public confusion about the challenge of managing our wildlife resources at acceptable ecological and societal levels. The disconnect created by misinformed activist campaigns poses a huge and persistent challenge to professional wildlife biologists everywhere.

Few areas of wildlife management in North America are as challenging as furbearer management and the traps that are so critical to this management. No subject is more contentious or misunderstood than the need to manage our wild furbearers.

SEE ALSO: Humane trapping research program leads the world. Truth About Fur.

While we work from an extensive platform of experience and constantly evolving science, we know that we are but players in an emotional theatre on the large stage of public discourse. We very much need not only science and devotion, but also public understanding and support to conduct our work successfully.

The management of furbearers is an integral and critical thread in the finely woven and complicated tapestry of environmental management in North America. Trapping is critical to these efforts.

While, at times, a ban on the harvest of certain wildlife populations is appropriate, recently, more often than not, we have fallen victim to our successes and are forced to manage surpluses. There is no better role model of successful and sustainable wildlife management in North America than that of our furbearer resource.

SEE ALSO: Reasons we trap. Truth About Fur.

Cyclic Populations

All wildlife populations are naturally cyclic – they rise and fall over time, triggered by a variety of factors.  The downside of that cycle isn’t pretty or humane – think mange, rabies, starvation, habitat destruction and increased prey populations. 

Wildlife biologists in North America work diligently to manage all wildlife populations at ecological and socially acceptable levels. Wild furbearers are no exception. The public have little tolerance when these populations reach unacceptable levels. Think rabies transmitted by overpopulated raccoons. Or property flooded by hyper-active beavers.

The real question, then, at the heart of this challenge is not whether some furbearer populations must be managed, but whether excess animals are used for public benefit or left to rot in the wild. Pest control activity or natural mortality will dispose of them if they are not used for public benefit. But pest control will be at the tax-payers' expense, while disease, starvation and predation, though natural, cannot be considered humane.

This is a zero sum game!

From Watershed Managers to Aquaculturists

The groups that rely on the stable and manageable levels of furbearers are extensive and economically impressive. Watershed managers, farmers, orchardists, park managers and the forestry industry are just a few that rely on population controls. Aquaculturists, for example, are predictably unforgiving of otter populations that consume their profits.

Certainly, no group has a more compelling need for control than biologists dealing with surplus populations that threaten their work. Plover restoration, for example, is a cogent example where numbers of predators like foxes and raccoons need to be carefully controlled at complemental levels. Even in predator research, high populations of furbearers like foxes and bobcats can become problems. Public health officials also look to biologists and traps when dealing with public health issues like rabies.

Increasingly, pet owners have become involved in this debate as well.  There are towns and cities in the United States today where small dogs and cats can’t be left unattended outdoors lest they fall prey to hungry coyotes.

SEE ALSO: Will urban coyotes change the animal rights debate? Truth About Fur.

It is disheartening that we have been ineffective in making the wider public aware not only of our challenges, but also of the great opportunities for public benefit that wise and careful furbearer management provides. It is particularly disheartening when merchandising and fashion executives, unaware of the opportunities these resource programs offer, ditch wild fur in favor of petroleum-based synthetics (aka: plastics).

Claiming recognition for environmental vision by rejecting wild fur would be comic if it weren’t so tragic and illogical. 

It’s even tougher to watch that lack of awareness exploited by animal rights activists. The exploitation of corporate ignorance is maddening and enormously disappointing to professional biologists. The history of wildlife management is littered with the unintended consequences of emotionally driven management initiatives. 

One must wonder, is single species’ advocacy one of ignorance or arrogance? Is it possible to be so fanatical in pursuit of one species, one suite of species, or a critical device (traps), that advocates are blinded to the ecological niche that these animals have in the complex ecosystem? 

Claiming recognition for environmental vision by banning wild fur would be comic if it weren’t so tragic and illogical. 

In Search of a Common Language

The United States and Canadian governments, in recognition of the importance of this issue, have appropriated millions of dollars to establish humane standards for these critical programs. Numerous states and the Canadian provinces and territories have invested similarly. The evolving improvement to international humane standards in foothold traps is evidence of the success of this effort. This joint Federal/State research effort, enhanced with the on-going information sharing between the US and Canada, is often cited as one of the largest wildlife research efforts ever undertaken in North America.

Perhaps someday all of us who love animals (all of us in these debates certainly do) may find a common language in this discourse and reach a level of rapprochement that will allow for mutual respect – not only for one another, but also for our wildlife resources.

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(Editor's note: Wildlife management in Africa may seem far removed from managing beavers and coyotes in North America, but combatting misinformation from animal rights groups is a challenge now being faced everywhere. Photo: The True Green Alliance.)

The scourge of animal rights-ism permeates the whole world. It is as rife in Africa as it is in North America and the rest of the world. I am an 80-year-old ex-game warden with 60 years of experience in the management of Africa’s national parks and big game animals. My particular interests concern maintaining the health and vigour of national park habitats, and the proper management of elephants and black rhinos; and I pull my hair out at the blatant lies that the animal rightists tell innocent nature lovers, the world over, about both species.

The most recent one is that the African elephant is facing extinction. We are told that unless the world stops the sale of ivory, stops the legal hunting of elephants, and stops their lethal management (culling), the elephant will slide down the slippery slope to extinction. This comes from people, remember, who live in the First World, who have never seen an elephant in their lives, and who have no accountability for whatever bad recommendations they make to "save" the African elephant. Meanwhile, the opinions of experienced elephant managers, like myself, are pushed aside as "contrived fabrications". And the whole world believes them, not the likes of me!

The elephants of Africa occur in 37 countries, or “range states”, and form 150 distinct populations. The habitats vary widely, including montane forests, deciduous forests of many kinds, savannah (treed grasslands), grasslands, thornveld, dry bushveld, teak forests, swamps, and true deserts. The rainfall in these different habitats varies from practically no rainfall at all to over 200 inches a year. Their interactions with humans are sometimes hostile - both ways - and sometimes docile. Some are poached, others are not poached. And the natural environmental pressures that each population has to endure due to variances in vegetation type, altitude, temperature and rainfall, are never the same. Consequently, the management needs of each of these populations have to be assessed on their own merits, and a management strategy, that is entirely focussed on one population at a time, has to be applied.

If this requirement is not complex enough, the management strategy that is applied to each population has to take cognizance of each population’s "safety status", which is determined by the elephant carrying capacity of the population’s habitat, measured against the number of animals in the population. Thus, if the sustainable carrying capacity of the habitat is 2,500 elephants and the population numbers 50,000 (as is the case with Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park today), the population is determined to be excessive (grossly excessive, in this case). If the sustainable carrying capacity is 10,000 and the population numbers 8,000 to 10,000, the population is deemed to be safe because it is "inside" (below) the carrying capacity limitation. And if the carrying capacity of a habitat is determined to be 10,000 and the population number is only 1,000 and falling, that population is deemed to be unsafe.

A Complex Science

Safe populations require conservation management (annual culling) to make sure they don't grow to the extent that they exceed the habitat’s carrying capacity. And unsafe populations need preservation management (protection from all harm), with the purpose of helping the population to return to a safe status. Excessive elephant populations require drastic and immediate population reduction. This is for the sake of the elephants themselves, for the health of their habitats (which excessive populations totally destroy), and for the maintenance of the biological diversities of our national parks. Indeed, the first action that needs to be taken on an excessive population is to reduce its numbers as quickly as possible, by no less than 50%.

SEE ALSO: Thousands of baby elephants starve every year - Too many for national parks. By Ron Thomson, True Green Alliance, Apr. 21, 2019.

All this will tell you that elephant management is a complex science.

It will also tell you that labelling the African elephant as an “endangered species” is simply a very stupid act. The very name “endangered species” implies that every single elephant population is unsafe, declining, and facing extinction, and that they thus all deserve to be managed according to the prescriptions of preservation management. But that is not the case at all.

Lots of elephants in West Africa are unsafe (due entirely to bad governance), many in East Africa are (now) safe, and every single elephant population in southern Africa (south of the Zambezi and Cunene Rivers) is grossly excessive. So, if an elephant population is declared to be endangered – and all its populations are subjected to preservation management - its excessive and safe populations will all be subject to total mismanagement. All the elephant populations of southern Africa exceed the carrying capacities of their habitats by between 10 and 20 times the numbers that they should be! For example, there could be as many as 200,000 too many elephants in the Botswana mega-elephant-population.

And yet the animal rightists continue to tell these lies in order to fraudulently make money out of a gullible public; the press continue to support them; and the governments of the world allow all this misrepresentation to happen. It is a crazy world that we live in – because we know that we are right and the animal rightists are wrong. All we can do is keep trying to create a properly informed public because they are the people who can make a difference.

Sustenance Through Wildlife, Not Livestock

There is a human population explosion in Africa, and the realities are as follows. There were 95.9 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa in the year 1900. By 2000, that number had increased to 622 million. And if the same rate of population increase continues throughout the 21st century, there will be over 4 billion people living in this same region by 2100. And they will all be trying to eke out a living from this finite continent, with its finite resources.

There will, by the year 2100, certainly be no wild land left unoccupied by humans. And in their never-ending search for a means to survive, Africa’s rural people will have, by then, extirpated all wildlife outside the national parks (and maybe inside the national parks, too). And they will be entirely dependent on domestic animals and cultivated crops for their survival.

By the year 2100, therefore, the only animals that are certain of survival will be domestic animals – cattle, sheep and goats. Why? Because the rural people of Africa cannot afford to have them become extinct.

Meanwhile, their wild equivalents – elephants, buffaloes, lions, leopards, rhinos, etc. – are potentially far more valuable than livestock, and people could make infinitely more money out of their sustainable use than they could ever hope to make from cattle, sheep and goats.

People like me (and there are many of us) are therefore striving to get Africa’s rural people to convert their means of earning a living, from livestock to wildlife. Only in this way can we be sure that the elephants, buffaloes, lions, leopards and rhinos of this continent will survive this century.

It is ironic, therefore, that the animal rightists, by insisting that man cannot and should not be able to “make money out of wildlife”, could be the very people who cause Africa’s wildlife to become extinct. 

SEE ALSO: The elephant's Armageddon (1). By Ron Thomson, True Green Alliance, Oct. 16, 2017.

SEE ALSO: The elephant's Armageddon (2). The elephant is not facing extinction. By Ron Thomson, True Green Alliance, Oct. 19, 2017.

There is a saying that the only things we all have in common are birth, death, and taxes. If there is a fourth thing common to every human being on the planet, it is that human lives depend on killing animals. This is true for hunters, trappers, animal-rights activists, vegans, and everyone else, regardless of where we live, our cultural differences, or our lifestyle choices. I don’t say this out of callousness or for shock value; rather, to put every one of us on the same page, in the same common history book of our species. If only for a moment.

I would like to think we can all have the humility and honesty to acknowledge the fact that human life depends on the death of animals, despite how uncomfortable we may be with this truth. To that end, I won’t spend time going over the various ways that human civilizations and settlements displace wildlife and affect habitat. Many of us do our best to reduce our direct and indirect impacts on the natural world, but close as they may come, these impacts will never reach zero. None of us is exempt from the effects of human civilization on wildlife. The task as I see it is not so much to accept or refute this fact, but rather to reflect on our own understandings of it and what it means to have a relationship with animals that involves death.

One of the most common points of disagreement in conversations about animal ethics centers on the consumptive uses of animals. Concerns over the treatment of both wild and domestic animals and their use for food, fur, and other products is an important conversation and one that I believe should be of highest ethical importance to human beings; however, we often bring a set of unstated and embedded assumptions to these discussions that need to be examined if we are to ever truly understand our own ethics, have productive conversations with others, and be effective at conservation.

Reflecting on Foundational Concepts

One of the underlying assumptions that we need to critically reflect on in discussions over the use of animals is the very concept of killing. Our individual and collective understanding of the moral defensibility in killing animals and the nature of the human-animal relationship that is established through an interaction that involves killing are informed by our views of death itself.

In discussing the ethics around the use of animals, we must be thoughtful to the fact that understandings of central concepts such as death and killing are not universal. Cultures throughout the world have vastly different understandings of what it means to die, what happens after death, the relationship between life and death, and therefore what it means on a deep ethical level to kill an animal. Therefore, we cannot approach discussions with the assumption that we all understand the moral foundations of the topic in the same way. More importantly, we must be conscious not to assume that our own culturally-grounded way of understanding these concepts is correct. To approach conversations of such ethical gravity in that way is to demonstrate a sense of cultural centrism that has proven dangerous to both human cultures and ecological systems in the past.

It is possible that some of us have never really taken the time to deeply reflect on our own relationship with the death of wild animals. For the majority of the world that lives in urban centers and will never be personally involved in killing an animal, thinking about this may never be a necessity. In his examination of humanity’s relationship with nature and our own natural history, the author J.B. MacKinnon in The Once and Future World poignantly describes watching a grizzly bear feed on an elk calf. MacKinnon reflects on nature’s experience with death: “springtime in Yellowstone is not the season of gambolling fox kits ... but of the hungry bear and wary bison. Of death, that ordinary horror”. Killing is all around us all the time; whether and how we choose to understand that fact of life on a primal and philosophical level is our choice. MacKinnon goes on to suggest that “to endure among other species, you must experience the world as a place you share with them”. If we wish to share the world with wild creatures and natural processes, we owe it to ourselves to engage with them on their terms.

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Consider the fact that most modern human beings eat next to nothing that is hunted or gathered from the terrestrial surface of the earth. This is an outcome that would strike our ancestors as bizarre if not apocalyptic, and yet it can’t be said to be the product of choice. We drifted to this point, generation by generation.

J.B. MacKinnon in "The Once and Future World"

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Let me clear about what this is not. I dislike dead-end arguments in discussions about ethics. It might be tempting to dispute the suggestion that death and killing are equal parts culturally contingent concepts and natural parts of the world, as simply a hunter’s way of justifying his own actions. That has been suggested to me before and I will humour that idea, but it is far more complex than that. Human ethics change over time to incorporate new ideas and knowledge and this changing is precisely what keeps ethics strong and meaningful. Therefore, the suggestion that any single argument can settle an ethical debate is unconvincing at best and suspicious at worst. This is not a claim that killing wildlife is morally defensible because “we have always done it”. I don’t believe that historical precedent justifies continued practice. However, in the same way that history does not justify the present, neither can it be disregarded as irrelevant. So I do think that the long history of interaction between humans and wildlife that has always involved a predator-prey relationship makes the conversation worth having in light of that history and not in exclusion of it. Cultures and belief systems are built upon shared experiences and give rise to knowledge systems and worldviews that are rooted in the places of those experiences. It is the diversity of these cultures that contributes to different understandings of what it means to kill an animal and our conversations on the ethics of killing and using animals must include space for the wide variety of cultural views that exist in the world.

Multiple Worldviews

Our evaluation of the ethics in killing animals for our own uses is bound to be informed in some measure by our understanding of what death means and the subsequent emotions we attach to dying and being dead. It is helpful to consider examples of different cultural understandings of death. These contrasting worldviews around death mean that understandings about the relationship enacted with an animal in the act of killing it can also be very different. Bear in mind that I am highlighting two examples here and that the diversity of human cultural perspectives is nearly as wide and deep as the biodiversity of the natural world itself.

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The dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country

"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare

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The Reverend Charles A. Curran, Professor at Loyola University of Chicago, discusses an understanding of death informed by Judaeo-Christian traditions. Curran explains that in Christian worldviews, death “immediately invokes in us the emotion of fear”. This fear of death is not so much a fear of the physical process of dying, but rather “the notion of the beyond that the word ‘death’ brings to us, because its fear is a fear of the beyond”. This fear is also related to the gravity of having to weigh the morality of our lives and what Curran describes as an “extreme ego anxiety about passing into nothingness” – the fear of irrelevance and being forgotten. There are other more obvious teachings in Christianity about what killing means for the morality of our own lives.

A Judaeo-Christian view of death has been imprinted on some of Western culture’s most influential pieces of art and literature, and it is perhaps only natural that our feelings around our own death would be imparted onto animals when we consider their death. Daniel E. Van Tassel, Professor of English at Muskingum College, notes “the stamp of such Christian views of death” in the “expression of fear at the imminence of death” among a number of Shakespeare’s characters. Van Tassel cites three reasons to fear death in Judaeo-Christian traditions: we fear losing the enjoyment of life and worldly pleasures, the emotional and physical pain that comes with death, and the eternal misery after death. In considering how such a culturally-dominant, if latent and subconscious, understanding of death may impact our view of killing animals, we can certainly identify in animal-rights and other anti-hunting/trapping campaigns references to the second fear of death: fear about the pain and suffering that killing brings. In this fear we see MacKinnon’s characterization of death, “that ordinary horror”.

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Like other northern hunting peoples, many Yukon First Nation people conceive of hunting as a reciprocal social relationship between humans and animals.

Paul Nadasdy, in "Agricultural metaphors and the politics of wildlife management in the Yukon". 

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In a book chapter I have frequently returned to in discussions over human-animal relationships, Paul Nadasdy, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, discusses the contrasts between Western and Yukon First Nations’ understandings of the concept of wildlife management, focusing particularly on contrasting notions of ownership and control between cultures. Within a Yukon First Nations worldview, humans and animals interact on the basis of a reciprocal social relationship defined by the need to uphold certain responsibilities. Humans hunt wildlife but do so within the context of specific practices designed to maintain the relationship, practices that vary between cultures, but “commonly include the observance of food taboos, ritual feasts, and prescribed methods for disposing of animal remains, as well as injunctions against overhunting and talking badly about, or playing with, animals”. Maintaining the social relationship one has with animals is of utmost importance and in this particular cultural worldview, involves killing.

There is an element of control and agency that is important in understanding the contrast between different worldviews. In a Western worldview, humans are most commonly positioned above and in control of nature: the world is here to be used by humans. In, for example, a Yukon First Nations worldview, animals have agency and can choose not to present themselves to human hunters. Humans must therefore fulfill certain social obligations towards animals and these obligations are often carried out through hunting. The concept of killing and what it means to kill an animal is thus conceived of quite differently in a Yukon First Nations context than one dominated by Western knowledge and cultural traditions.

The idea that there exists a plurality of knowledges informed by one’s culture must accompany us into ethical conversations and decision-making around the use of animals. We must remember that in many cultures, a context of respect and gratitude is the very the foundation of how humans have come to understand a relationship with animals that involves killing.

Conclusions

I am not a religious person and I would not even suggest that I am spiritual. I have come to understand my actions and morality on my own terms and I have tried to inform that understanding as much as possible by lessons in nature, though inspiration for this understanding can come from many places. I want to make it clear that caring deeply about wildlife is not dependent on religious or spiritual guidance; I have thought and felt deeply about both the individual animals I have killed and about the populations and species of which those individuals were a part. When I kill an animal, there is an intense and undeniable connection with that individual – from the moment I first see it to every single time I cook a portion of it – and there is also a connection with that animal that feels more historic, a sense of shared history on the landscape. Animal-rights campaigns often focus on individual animals that have been given human names. This kind of anthropomorphism often loses the ability to situate the relationship between human and animals on an evolutionary scale. For me, it is precisely the simultaneous feelings of intense personalization with an individual animal and a depersonalization with the awareness that there is a deeper historic interaction that we are a part of that gives the encounter so much meaning.

One thing that many of us can agree on is that healthy ecosystems and wildlife populations are critical for the survival of our species and this planet. We might also agree that maintaining healthy ecosystems and wildlife populations depends on human appreciation and valuation of those places and species and in order for humans to care about and take care of the natural world, they need a personal relationship with it. It may be that some wish to redefine the foundation of this relationship in a way that reflects changing social and cultural norms, but this cannot be taken for granted and this new foundation cannot be laid without conscious and thoughtful reflection, otherwise we risk losing the historic relationships within which both humans and animals have mutually evolved.

We may personally disagree with particular conservation policies or strategies, but it is imperative that we maintain our connections with animals and understand that there are cases where this connection takes place through an interaction that involves death. I personally consider ethical concerns about animal welfare as one of our most important considerations in killing animals. However, when engaging in discussions with one another over the ethics of using animals, we need to be conscious of the foundational assumptions on which these conversations are built. We need to identify and critically reflect on the culturally specific concepts we bring to our decision-making around killing and understand and respect that ethics are a sliding scale throughout the world.

In doing so, we may find that misunderstandings and disagreements run deeper than the specific applications and policies we find ourselves debating and that we gain much more from engaging with a plurality of ethical perspectives than from disregarding them.