Hi, sorry I somehow missed this until just now—far too late! Still I feel I need to say that I think you’ve missed the point. With windmills it is not necessarily the case that the average bird will live a shorter life. If some birds are killed by windmills, then others will have more to eat or will have more habitat (whatever factor it is that otherwise limits this bird population) and will then succumb to that death later. Or perhaps with windmills their main predator will just scavenge on the dead birds, rather than predating them. The point is, there is no reason to assume that the average life will be shorter—either way, some factors are limiting the population, and without directly comparing them we just cannot make this claim.
Establishing a norm of caring about wild animals is good, but it seems to me that you are only encouraging people to care about human-caused harms, rather than the welfare of wild animals generally. There is a risk that people only care about the dirtiness of their own hands, rather than the animals themselves.
Hi, sorry I somehow missed this until just now—far too late! Still I feel I need to say that I think you’ve missed the point. With windmills it is not necessarily the case that the average bird will live a shorter life. If some birds are killed by windmills, then others will have more to eat or will have more habitat (whatever factor it is that otherwise limits this bird population) and will then succumb to that death later. Or perhaps with windmills their main predator will just scavenge on the dead birds, rather than predating them. The point is, there is no reason to assume that the average life will be shorter—either way, some factors are limiting the population, and without directly comparing them we just cannot make this claim.
Establishing a norm of caring about wild animals is good, but it seems to me that you are only encouraging people to care about human-caused harms, rather than the welfare of wild animals generally. There is a risk that people only care about the dirtiness of their own hands, rather than the animals themselves.
I hope that makes sense.