What do we owe feral animals?

A common ethical view, widely reflected in legislation, accepts duties of care for domesticated animals under human control, but does not extend such duties to free-living wild animals. This paper addresses the question of what is owed to a group of animals that falls between these two groups, i.e. feral animals that have domesticated origins, but that now live largely independently. We discuss the question in light of two contentious cases: feral horses on Sable Island in Canada and Soay sheep on the island of Hirta in the Scottish Hebrides. Both populations are located on resource-restricted islands with periodic severe challenges to food supply. These challenges have led to significant ethical disagreement about whether to treat the animals as wild and leave them alone, or to accept duties of care by providing supplementary food or controlling population size to reduce suffering. For the Soay sheep, and to some extent for the Sable Island horses, the debate seems to centre around whether they are perceived to be wild or domestic animals. We argue that management of feral animals should consider more than the assigned domestic or wild 'status' of the animals and seek to engage stakeholders in making decisions based on multiple and, to some degree, competing values, including animal welfare, wildness, biodiversity, and other conservation values.