Can Applied Ethics Lead to Justice for Animals?

In the summer of 2023, approximately 2,000 young, dead penguins washed up on the beaches across Uruguay. The birds were thin, their stomachs empty, and scientists suggest that this mass death was due to starvation. Without fat, the penguins can’t keep warm in the colder waters that they now have to navigate to find food. Food shortages due to overfishing in South America may have contributed to their demise. This die-off was unprecedented for the species, although the magellanic penguin population has been consistently dropping, and the species is now considered near threatened. Impacts of climate change, which contributed to these penguins’ precarity, were also likely the cause of the mass deaths of penguins in New Zealand in 2022, when hundreds of little blue penguins washed up dead. They probably died because warming oceans forced them to venture into deeper and colder waters in search of food, causing them to dive to distances that are not sustainable. These birds were also found to be thinner than they should have been. An even more drastic penguin die-off occurred in Antarctica in 2022—over 10,000 emperor penguin chicks perished when the sea-ice they were growing up on melted before they had the fat and waterproofed feathers needed to survive in the cold waters. Most of the birds drowned or froze to death. These sorts of large-scale group deaths have led scientists to suggest that the emperor penguins will be extinct by the end of the century.