When Animal Welfare Stops Being Comfortable — The Realities Nobody Likes Talking About

Earlier today I was out working with a dog that has a long and very real history of disappearing after deer, a real deer chaser. Not the occasional curiosity chase, but the kind of dog that has previously come back injured, blood stained and the kind of situation where you can’t honestly say whether wildlife has been injured or not because once a dog disappears into forest or woodland, you simply don’t know what has happened out of sight. The purpose of the session was deer avoidance work, building distance, reinforcing disengagement, and creating a pattern of behaviour that keeps both the dog and wildlife safe. That part matters, and it’s important work, but it isn’t actually what has been sitting in my head throughout the day.

While watching the herd, I noticed a young deer amongst them, smaller framed than the rest, and very clearly carrying what appeared to be a broken front leg. It could still move. It could still stay with the herd. But it wasn’t moving normally. It was compensating, and when you’ve spent enough time watching animals move, you know the difference between stiffness, soreness, and structural injury. This looked like the latter. The owner of the dog and I both felt sorry for the young deer. Then we moved on.

Later, I reported what I had seen to the RSPCA. They were professional and responsive, and the report was passed to a local deer manager — someone with proven proficiency in identifying and, where necessary, humanely dispatching injured deer. The response was grounded and realistic. Unless the animal can be safely contained on private land, there is very little that can be done. Discharging firearms in public or semi-public environments brings obvious safety risks, and those risks quite rightly have to come first.

So, in practical terms, the deer is left to whatever happens next.

Now, this is where things start to get uncomfortable.

Because I own a three-legged dog. Tinkerbell – or Tink, as most people who follow my work will know. Tink became three-legged after a break around her shoulder fused badly and was very likely causing ongoing pain. When I took her to the vet, I asked a very direct question. If I leave her as she is, am I allowing her to suffer unnecessarily? The answer was yes. So I asked the second question, the one people sometimes think you shouldn’t ask if you truly care about animals. What about euthanasia?

I asked that because whilst I love my animals deeply, I am not guided purely by my own emotional comfort. I am guided by what is actually in their best interests, and I am not arrogant enough to believe my feelings override professional expertise in areas that sit firmly inside someone else’s profession. The vet was clear that euthanasia wasn’t necessary, that removing the limb would likely give her a slightly shorter life, but one that would be comfortable, functional, and full of quality. That is exactly what has happened. Tink doesn’t just cope. She thrives. I would have been prepared to let her go that day if that had been the kindest outcome, and I make absolutely no apology for saying that, because loving animals properly sometimes means being prepared to make decisions that are painful for us, but protective for them.

I have also, in the same general area where I saw the young deer, previously seen and photographed a wild, three-legged deer moving normally, accessing ground it needed to, feeding, surviving, doing what deer do. Nobody darted that deer and performed surgery. It either adapted to injury over time or it was born that way, but the key point is that it was functional. The deer I saw today did not look like that. It looked like an animal in the early stages of adapting to a life carrying an injury, not at the far end of one.

What struck me in that moment was how direct the parallel actually was. Tinkerbell and that deer are both mammals. Both suffered significant forelimb injury. In Tink’s case, a veterinary professional was clear that leaving the limb as it was would likely constitute ongoing and unnecessary suffering. Euthanasia was discussed as a legitimate welfare outcome, but ultimately rejected because limb removal offered a viable path to a comfortable, functional life. That is exactly what has happened. She adapted. She thrives. She continues to thrive.

The adult three-legged deer I photographed previously had clearly done the same. It was feeding, moving, surviving, existing within its environment in a way that was functional and sustainable. So this is not a question of whether a deer can adapt to limb loss. Clearly, in some cases, they can. The difference is not biological potential. The difference is intervention threshold.

For a domestic dog, euthanasia would be considered unacceptable if a viable, welfare-positive alternative exists. For a wild deer, the reverse is often true. The alternative — capture, sedation, surgical intervention, rehabilitation and release — is not usually considered acceptable, not because it is impossible, but because of cost, logistics, time, risk, and resource allocation. A wild animal can be darted. It can be sedated. Limbs can be surgically removed. Animals can and do return to the wild after intervention. But the reality is that this level of intervention is rarely feasible at scale, and group compassion has practical limits.

And I think we have to be honest about that. Ownership changes everything. Where we have direct responsibility, we invest more. Emotionally. Financially. Practically. We intervene more quickly and more aggressively to preserve life and welfare. Where we do not have ownership, our compassion often becomes observational rather than actionable.

There are circumstances where even organisations known for strong animal rights positions have acknowledged that ending an animal’s life quickly can be an act of mercy when suffering is unavoidable. That matters, because it recognises something fundamental — that sometimes preventing further suffering is the most humane option available, even when that reality is uncomfortable for us.

What becomes harder to reconcile is where that same ethical reasoning seems to stop. If it is accepted that ending an animal’s life can, in certain circumstances, be the most humane response once suffering is already unavoidable, then it raises an uncomfortable question about why non-fatal interventions designed to prevent suffering are treated so differently.

At the time of writing, incidents of dogs chasing and attacking livestock in the UK continue to rise, despite decades of legislation, education and public messaging. Recent figures already suggest an increase of around ten per cent on last year alone. Those figures, however, are based only on reported incidents. From my own experience over many years working directly with owners of dogs that chase, worry, attack or kill livestock, the number of incidents that are actually reported is likely to represent only a fraction of the reality. Conservatively, I would suggest perhaps one in five incidents ever reach an official report. The issue is widely acknowledged across both mainstream news and farming media, particularly at this time of year as lambing season approaches, when the same warnings are repeated annually, yet the same upward trend in attacks continues.

Much of my professional work is focused on prevention — on teaching dogs active avoidance of livestock and wildlife so that those encounters never escalate into injury, death or enforcement. In reality, that very often involves deliberately creating brief moments of discomfort or unpleasantness for the dog in order to prevent far greater harm later on to the dog itself, to other animals, or in some cases to people.

I grew up rurally. Wildlife, farming, life and death were not abstract concepts where I lived. They were simply part of the landscape. Some of the moments that shaped how I now look at animal suffering happened long before I ever worked professionally with dogs.

When I was around seven years old, I was walking with my dad on the Cornish coastal path when we came across a rabbit sitting exposed and not moving away from us. Its eyes were swollen and bulging, and there was thick discharge coming from its nose and eyes. I had pet rabbits at the time – around 13 of them! My dad had taken about 1/5 of our (large) garden and built a huge, secure run which ran the length of it. At one end was access to a secure hutch where the rabbits slept. They lived as natural a life as childhood captivity could accommodate; running, digging and existing as a social group. At the time of seeing the clifftop rabbit, I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but as an adult I recognise those signs as late-stage myxomatosis. I remember feeling helpless and my helplessness upset me more than anything. The rabbit was alive, but not living in any way that made sense to me as a child.

My dad didn’t hesitate. He picked the rabbit up, carried it to the cliff edge, and threw it over. I remember watching it hit the rocks below and die instantly. And I remember him explaining, calmly, that sometimes the hardest actions are the kindest ones when an animal is suffering.

My mum reinforced that same principle in a completely different way. I remember a mouse that our cat had caught. The mouse was still alive, but only just. My mum hated what she was about to do, you could see it on her face, but she ended its life instantly using a patio slab and a stone.

During the right time of year, the pig farmer near us would have friends come to shoot corvids that were damaging his crops. I would watch from the garden wall and run out hoping to find injured birds that I could “save.” My dad would take them away to be “taken to the vet.” Only later did I understand he was making sure they were dispatched quickly and properly. I can genuinely still smell the feathers of the birds. I can also hear the scraping of their feet on the cardboard base and see their gaping, gasping beaks as they unknowingly awaited what I believed to be humane release from their suffering. It was only later on that I accepted how true this was.

Having moved from my rural childhood home, I spent my teenage years growing up in a coastal town in Cornwall. The harbour was a working harbour. Fishing boats came and went constantly, and with that came the reality of unintended catch. Spider crabs. Damaged fish. Animals that simply didn’t meet the grade commercially.

Some were already dead when they were discarded. Others were thrown back alive but badly damaged or too stressed to survive. At low tide you would see them stranded, some already dead, others very clearly dying. Gulls would come down and feed on them, sometimes on animals that were still alive.

In effect, we create environmental niches through human activity, and then often justify what happens next as natural process. Almost a cascading chain of consequences.

The label “pest” itself is often nothing more than a human judgement about compatibility with human goals. And once that label is applied, it can quietly strip away the instinctive welfare consideration we might extend to other animals. In certain Australian states, wild dogs and Dingo hybrids are considered ‘pests’. They are targeted and destroyed in order to protect and promote human interests. I wonder how people feel about ‘pest’ dogs compared to ‘pest’ insects or rodents?

Another example that sits uncomfortably inside this conversation is the way we view rats themselves. In many parts of the world, rats are automatically categorised as pests — something to be removed, controlled, or eradicated because they are seen as incompatible with human health, human comfort or human outcomes. If someone were to see a rat dragging an injured leg through a city street, most people would not instinctively feel compelled to intervene in the way they might for a dog, or even a deer.

I remember once asking a psychology professor, while standing inside a university laboratory housing hundreds of rats and mice for research, what fundamentally separated those animals from any other mammalian species. Why, I asked, was there not the same public outcry about the use of a sentient, intelligent animal in procedures that could involve harm or suffering? The answer was simple, and brutally honest.

The plague.

Whether historically accurate in every sense or not was almost beside the point. The association was enough. The rat had become culturally embedded as a symbol of disease, contamination and threat to human survival. And once that association exists strongly enough, it changes how a species is viewed, how it is justified, and how it is treated.

And yet in other parts of the world, rats are trained to detect landmines and unexploded ordnance, working in environments too dangerous for humans to safely clear. In those contexts, those same animals are not viewed as pests. They are trained, protected, invested in, and sometimes even described in terms we would normally reserve for human courage or sacrifice.

But the reality underneath that is uncomfortable. The rat itself has no understanding of heroism. It has no concept of sacrifice, risk, or the potential consequences of what it is doing. It has been conditioned — carefully, skilfully, and often very humanely — to behave in ways that serve a human purpose. The moral language that sits around that work exists for us, not for the animal.

That does not diminish the value of the work. It does not diminish the care that may exist between human and animal in those partnerships. But it does underline something that is very difficult to ignore if we are being completely honest with ourselves: the driving force behind that relationship is human survival, human safety, and human interest.

And once we acknowledge that, it becomes harder to pretend that humans sit outside of nature, or outside of the same survival priorities that shape every other species. We intervene where it matters most to us. We assign value where it intersects most closely with our own needs. And often, only afterwards do we wrap those decisions in moral language that allows us to feel comfortable with them.

That said, I am not opposed to reducing numbers within a species or population where doing so genuinely protects, preserves or promotes the long-term health and vitality of that species itself. Nor am I opposed, in principle, to the targeted lethal reduction of a species where its population growth is directly threatening the survival of a less resilient or more vulnerable species. Those are real ecological discussions, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.

Where it becomes more complex, at least for me, is recognising the very thin line between acting in what we believe to be the best interests of nature, and assuming that human intervention carries greater authority or understanding than nature itself. Species decline and extinction are not new phenomena. They are part of evolutionary reality. They have happened long before humans existed, they continue to happen now, and they will continue to happen long after we are gone.

If we were to take a truly strict naturalistic position — a genuine “leave it entirely to nature” approach — then logically we would have to accept all suffering as part of that same system. Not just in wildlife, but in domestic animals, in companion animals, and in every situation where we currently intervene to prevent pain, injury or death.

And perhaps the uncomfortable truth sitting just beneath that is that the human animal is no less a part of nature than the rat, the spider crab, the gull or the deer. Yet precious few people, wherever they sit in debates about animal welfare, would willingly place the welfare of another species above the health, safety and future of their own children. That is not something I say as criticism. It is simply an acknowledgement of how deeply rooted attachment, responsibility and survival instincts are within us as a species, and how those instincts inevitably shape the lines we draw, whether we openly acknowledge them or not.

Which makes it harder to hide behind the idea that nature will take care of it, because in reality we tend to accept nature taking its course right up until the point where the outcome begins to affect something we personally value, protect or feel responsible for. And perhaps it is in that moment — when nature stops being abstract and starts being personal — that we find out what we really believe about suffering, responsibility and intervention.

And that is where, for me, the ethical impasse sits. That is where this becomes less about rules and more about reflection. Because the moment we accept that we will intervene somewhere, we are forced to confront why we intervene there and not somewhere else. The events that led to this blog, and the process of writing it, have really been about examining that internal courtroom — where my own actions, beliefs and decisions are constantly brought forward and tested against the same questions I find myself asking of the world around me.

This is not me adopting an animal rights position. I am not vegan. I am not even consistently vegetarian, although I have been at times. And this is not me attempting to drag others into that courtroom with me. Everyone has their own experiences, their own pressures, their own realities, and their own ethical negotiations that take place privately, often long before anything is ever spoken out loud.

Equally, this is not written as an attack on food production, pest control, conservation work, animal breeding, zoological management, or any rural or animal-dependent industry. I have friends, colleagues and supporters working across those spaces, and I have a deep respect for the realities, responsibilities and pressures that sit within them. This is simply me being honest about my own internal dialogue — about my own susceptibility to contradiction, about the way my own experiences shape my responses, and about the questions I find myself unable to ignore once I allow myself to ask them honestly.

Because ultimately, this blog is not about telling anyone else what they should think. It is about encouraging people to step into their own internal courtroom, to ask their own difficult questions, and to decide for themselves where their own lines sit — and why.

So when I saw that injured deer today, I wasn’t just seeing it through the lens of training or policing or adulthood. I was seeing it through decades of lived experience that taught me that compassion is not always soft. Sometimes compassion is decisive. And sometimes compassion means choosing the outcome that protects the animal from further suffering, even when that is not the emotionally comfortable choice for us.

And if I am honest, this is where livestock worrying sits for me as well. Not as a policy debate, but as a welfare reality. Because when a dog is taught to actively avoid livestock or wildlife, we are not just protecting the dog. We are protecting every animal that dog will ever encounter in that context. Preventing suffering rarely looks dramatic. It rarely looks emotional. But in terms of welfare outcome, it is often the difference between animals living normally and animals suffering the most horrendously slow and painful deaths in ways most ‘opinionated’ yet inexperienced people never have to witness.

I don’t think there are easy answers. But I do think these are questions worth being honest with ourselves about.

I hope this reflective piece encourages you to approach the discomfort of your own, internal witness box.