The letter from PAN Works offers two amendments to a letter sent to President Biden regarding beaver management on federal lands. First, it argues that beavers have intrinsic value beyond their instrumental ecosystem services, and decisions around harming or killing them require ethical consideration as they are sentient, sapient, and social beings. Second, it recommends replacing blanket exceptions to beaver protections with a process of strict ethical review of individual requests to harm beavers that considers both the scientific and ethical issues in each case. The letter concludes by calling on authorities to recognize both the instrumental and intrinsic values of beavers through policies that benefit people, animals, and nature.

1. PAN Works
Bringing Ethics to life
Ethics Signing Statement
for
Western Watersheds Project Letter to the Biden Administration Regarding
Beaver Management on Federal Lands
1 March 2023
Dear President Biden,
We commend our colleagues and civil society organizations in their call to end the
hunting and trapping of beavers on federal land.
Beavers are indeed indispensable landscape engineers, providing crucial ecosystem
services in the form of watershed management, habitat creation and protection, forest
fire and drought mitigation, flood control, as well as abundant and joyous opportunities
for wildlife watching. All of these benefits provided by beavers play important roles in
nature-based solutions to both the accelerating climate emergency and the critical loss
of biodiversity.
Here we want to offer two friendly amendments to their letter, neither of which
diminishes the importance of the original letter’s insights and requests, but rather
amplifies these points and strengthens the call to protect beavers and their habitats. We
offer these comments as individual members of PAN Works, an independent and
nonpartisan think tank dedicated to the wellbeing of animals.
First, beavers do provide important ecosystem services; however, this accounts for only
their instrumental value to people and nature. Beavers also have an intrinsic value and
a wellbeing of their own that must be factored into all management and policy
considerations if we are to develop sustainable conservation strategies.
An analogy based on shared features between people and other animals like beavers
may help us elaborate this point. As human beings, we are aware, self-aware and in
complex social relationships. The technical terms for these capacities is sentience,
sapience and sociality. It is for these capacities that people rightly are regarded as moral
beings to whom we have direct ethical responsibilities of care, respect and justice.

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Whether you locate these capacities in a divine plan, evolution, the souls of ancestors, or
some other explanation, these capacities are at the core of what it means to have
standing and significance in a moral and political community. It is for all of these
reasons that all public decisions to harm or kill other people (e.g., war-time defense,
lawful use of lethal force in policing) are fraught and require substantial reason and
evidence to justify.
Beavers are living beings like us. While they obviously differ from us in many ways that
we admire, they also are similar in that they too are sentient, sapient and social. They
exist as individuals, as family groups, and in complex social and ecological relationship
to the wider web of life. In the thought of Charles Darwin, beavers have their own share
of “mental powers” that entitle them to be treated as moral beings whose intrinsic value
ought to be honored in and of itself.
Thus, decisions about whether to kill, translocate or otherwise interfere with beavers are
always a moral as well as scientific concern, requiring rigorous ethical and scientific
analysis. Taking a page from legal reasoning, we term this strict ethical and legal
scrutiny.
Second, blanket exceptions to beaver protections are ethically problematic.
The intrinsic value of human and other lives is not fungible, but intrinsic to their being.
Taking or degrading another’s life requires careful consideration and justification to be
warranted if it is warranted at all. Blanket exceptions shortcut the deliberation needed
to make this judgment. This then may subject beavers to unethical and unscientific
abuse.
For this reason, we recommend that we go beyond blanket exceptions and adopt a
standard of strict scrutiny of both the science and ethics of any plan or request to hunt,
trap, harm, translocate or otherwise interfere with beavers on federal land. Requests to
do so should be made in writing, considered on a case-by-case basis, and formalized
through a process of strict ethical review. Multiple methods for such review by
members of the public and experts in ethics and science already exist — ethical, legal
and social implications research, citizen juries, and ethics briefs are but three examples.
The sovereignty of First Nations can be respected by instituting such reviews under the
jurisdiction of tribal government(s) when warranted.
Beavers are important members of our community of life. They carry both instrumental
and intrinsic values — co-values — that contribute to their own and our mutual
wellbeing. Federal, state, local and tribal authorities have a responsibility, whether
acknowledged or resisted, to adopt policies and management strategies that recognize
these co-values for the common good of people, animals and nature.
Sincerely,
William S. Lynn, Ph.D.
Founder & President
PAN Works

3. 3
Marlborough, MA 01752, USA
wlynn@panworks.io
Liv Baker, Ph.D.
Chair of the Board
PAN Works
lbaker@panworks.io
Francisco Santiago-Ávila, Ph.D.
Clerk
PAN Works
fsantiagoavila@panworks.io
Kristin L. Stewart, Ph.D.
Treasurer
PAN Works
kstewart@panworks.io