Why nonhuman animals too?

First of all we recommend that if you haven’t read the article non-speciesist suffering yet, please do and only then read the following answer.

What kind of a world would exist without humans? A much better one, no doubt.
Much much better.
But would it be a world without exploitation? Would it be a sufferingless world?

For many animal rights activists nature represents perfection, an ideal we should aspire to, or something spiritual that we should worship, something that ought to be preserved and never criticized. But the truth is that every other form of life is just as selfish, self-centered and gratuitously self-pleasing as ourselves.

A world without humans, as dreamy as it would be, won't be a sufferingless world and therefore it would be a partial solution.
Trillions of creatures would still suffer from rape, hunger, thirst, dehydration, infanticide, violent dominancy fights, constant fear of being hunted, diseases, torture, slavery and caducity.
In a humanless world, hyena cubs would still viscously fight each other, tearing slices of other cubs’ faces including ears and lips, to get more food.
In a humanless world wasps would still inject their eggs into a live caterpillar’s body to ensure that when their descendants hatch they will have breakfast (the wasp larva will eat the caterpillar from the inside out).
A humanless world is definitely not a masculinityless world. Brutal fights for territory and for the "right" to mate would still occur in immense numbers. Walrus would still fight each other over territory like sumo fighters with giant teeth that can reach up to one meter long and more than 5kg weight. And the biggest males with the biggest tusks would still push their way to the center of the iceberg pushing the females and pups to the edges where it is most dangerous.
In a humanless world billions of insects would still get chemically liquefied before they are eaten by spiders. And snakes would still swallow whole animals and slowly digest them until red tailed hawk would hunt them, digging in with their talons into the snakes’ body until they give up fighting back and then start to cut pieces of their body and eat them.
Eels would still electrify other fish to hunt them using up to 600V in a single discharge - this is 5 times the shock one would get from sticking a finger into an electrical socket.
Young offspring would still get murdered by opportunist males who want their own genes to be spread.
And duck, dolphin, sea lion females would still be gang raped.
It is so common among the hawaiian monk seals that it’s got a name - "mobbing". The males are so aggressive that they often kill the females and very often injure and hurt them. Immature seals of both sexes get hurt as well, accidentally standing in the way of the "mob".

Every single second somewhere in the world, a giant hornet fights a mantis, a shark fights an octopus, a white belly sea eagle fights a banded sea snake, a giant weta fights a bat and if the bat prevail the other bats will fight him over the weta, thunder lizards fight each other, a crown eagle fights a chevrotain, a blue crab fights ameloctopus, a giant centipedes fights an iguana, a galapagos snake fights a marine iguana, a polar bear fights a ringed seal, an arctic tern fights a polar bear (beating their noses when they come for their eggs), bat falcon fights other bats, a hawk fights a viper, a numbat devour termites, a crocodile an egret, a shoebill a lungfish, the mexican long tailed bat an insect, a coyote hunts a rabbit and an anaconda crushes a capybara to death or griping so tight that the blood can't even circulate and so the poor capybara slowly suffocate to death.

And the tiny fraction of animals that will escape their enemies will suffer from droughts, floods, diseases, hunger, thirst and the pain and misery of growing old.

We mustn’t accept suffering just because it happens in what we call nature, and to nonhuman animals by other nonhuman animals. Suffering is bad when it is considered natural just as much as when it is considered artificial.
A gazelle being killed by a cheetah is not painless because it is considered natural.
Natural doesn’t equal good. The gazelle suffers. He is not familiar with humans’ notions like natural.
All suffering should be stopped and it doesn’t matter how we define it, where it happens and by whom.

Even when it happens inside the family...
While mother egret is looking for food for her chicks, the stronger ones viciously peck their weakest brother or sister to gain more food for themselves. It gets worse when a crocodile is trying to reach their nest. The stronger chicks beat the weakest until he falls to the water so the crocodile will eat him and leave the rest alone.

It is very cruel and cynical to think that it’s part of life and that there is nothing we can do about it. The easiest way is to convince yourselves that it is natural and what is natural is o.k. But is rape o.k because it is done to nonhuman animals by other nonhuman animals? Does the raped animal care who rapes her? Does she care why she is being raped? Does she care that humans call it natural? She doesn’t. And if she doesn’t you shouldn’t either.

The fixation that what is natural must be good prevents any criticism. If not towards the creatures since they don’t reason as many often claim, then at least towards the behavior itself. But activists avoid criticizing actions happening in what they call nature because they fear it might cast to the actors too. The lack of criticism reaches absurdity as nothing among the behavior of animals is ever bad, if the harm cannot be emotionally ignored it is justified as being natural.
Tamarins for example need to eat all the time since they are constantly in motion. Same goes for mothers who need to eat as well as bring food to their young which are being left alone many times each day. Some people are so sure that nature is perfect that it somehow doesn’t affect the young. The defenseless young are in many cases being hunted but we are not talking about the obvious but rather about the pain of being left alone again and again and again. Frightened, starving and generally confused and helpless, all are affected by this behavior and some might even develop separation anxiety. We know it happens with animals we are related to like monkeys, dogs and of course humans. The psychological damage shouldn’t be ridiculed especially not by animal rights activists. It just can’t be that they are not harmed by it, and this is just one species out of many with the same situation.

Another example that would probably be ignored or indifferently disavow regards the Right Whale mating syndrome which includes jumping to impress the females. The flaps of 100 tons in the water are horrible to the seabed creatures. Think of the vibrations in the water, how it affects the whole surrounding. We doubt that the other inhabitants feel it is o.k because the most alienated from nature creature that ever lived calls it a natural phenomenon.
If the female whale is not interested another natural phenomenon in the miracle of life happens, she is being raped!
The whale female doesn’t have a choice but to surrender to the males’ courtships because several of them surround her and attacking her until she gives up and dive with one of them. Sometimes one of them feels he is close enough and pulls his 3.5 meters pence and attempts to rape her. Since whales have a tone weighting testicle with gallons of urethra, they can wash each others sperm out and so the female is ought to mate with many and only the last one will impregnate her.

And from violent mating to violent pregnancy. The cichlid fish mothers collect their young inside their mouth when they spot a sign of danger. The catfish are parasitic creatures who ruthlessly exploit this phenomenon. The mother catfish mix her eggs with the cichlid's eggs forcing the mother to collect them into her mouth as well as her own, manipulating her to become their surrogate mother. The catfish eggs hatch first and eat all the cichlid eggs inside their mother's body and get out to the sea when ready.

Nature, it is amazing how one magical word can purify any behavior.

It is an illusion to think that you don’t decide for the animals. Of course you do!
You decide for them to suffer from hunger, thirst and diseases. You decide for them to constantly fear predators. You decide they will be murdered by predators. You condemn billions to brutally fight each other over group dominance. You decide they will suffer from the torments of infirmity.
You decide that they will continue to suffer instead of not feeling any pain ever again.

You choose for the animals and for everybody in this world just from being alive and aware of what is going on. You can't choose not to choose because you know. You know that whales play volleyball with seals and you can't decide not to choose for them. When you are choosing not to activate the only one solution idea, you are choosing for the seals to keep suffering from internal organ damage and broken bones as they are beaten to the air by orcas 20 times their size.
You don’t have a choice but to choose for them. Not choosing is an illusion and the reality is that you choose the current state of affairs.
We know it is there, so we can't ignore it. We can’t be passive because it is another species involved.

It is not that we are active in choosing for them and you are passive. There is no passiveness. Knowing is choosing. You can either be ignorant or you can be active but you can’t be passive. If you know you choose. If you choose not to stop you choose to approve.

You choose to leave chimpanzees’ organized hunting trips (they don’t hunt only when there is an opportunity or only when the females are in heat) where each has a specific role, someone taps on a tree marking the others that the hunting trip had begun, some attack on the trees and some wait on the ground for the fallers. They are usually after red colobus monkeys, specifically looking for mothers and their young as they are most vulnerable. They separate them, kill them and eat them back in the colony splitting the meat among the entire group.
These horrifying episodes are conventional and always joined with a lot of yelling, trees pounding and branches flapping on the ground. How can a compassionate person watch it, hear it and say that it is o.k? and using what kind of justification? That the red colobus monkeys are in natural panic?

You choose that plovers will keep anxiously worry that their eggs will be damaged, from a stray hippo, inquisitive baboon or a hungry lizard and even from the sun that might boil their egg so the mother and father are forced to take turns in flying into the water, over and over and over so they hatch their egg while their wings are wet during the whole hot summer days.

The heat can turn the worst places in the world, even worse.
The plains of Africa are living hell all year long. The climate is rough all the time and the notorious battles between hyenas, lioness and vultures, jackals and cheetahs happen all the year round, but everything intensifies in the hot summer. The rivers become small pools and the savannah becomes dry land so everybody comes to drink in the same dried up rivers that have become measly pools. They all fight over the poor impalas, buffalo, darters, wildebeest and etc. that fear every time they come to drink.
Some inhabitants are extremely territorial especially the lions, the hippos and the crocodiles, so when the water levels drop and temperatures increase they are all forced together in such a small space and with so little water to drink and to cool in, that the violence is constant. The summer’s extreme conditions push them to their limits so except fighting over the same animals, lioness and crocodiles even hunt each other and both try to hunt hippos as well but usually without much of a success. They can only hunt unsupervised baby hippos and since they are herd animals it doesn’t happen very often. In fact the baby hippos’ greatest fear is other hippos.
The adults often kill each other during their fights over territories and mating rights all year long. In the summer the extreme density forces them to invade each other’s territory all the time and so constant violence takes place in the herd. The baby hippos are victims of this behavior. And if it is not direct violence, since the hippos are practically tied to each other, when a crocodile tries to hunt one of them the whole herd tries to escape in panic lashing each other over. That’s when the shrinking pools become a death trap. Small and weak hippos are crushed to death by the crowded herd. Many injured and slowly die from their wounds.

As opposed to the Darwin chaffinch which is well known as a blood thirsty bird who deliberately wound seabirds' back and drink their dripping blood, the oxpecker birds of Africa were considered to maintain mutualistic lives by picking parasites off large mammals like hippopotamus, rhinoceros and buffalos. However, it was recently realized that they also keep wounds on the animals' skin open to feed on the exuding blood. So you can choose to call it a symbiosis but in fact it’s tormenting opportunism.

Another kind of opportunism commonly takes place among the beloved Emperor penguins in the Antarctic who stand on the brink of the water, hesitating before diving in, fearing that a sea leopard might ambush them, naturally nobody wants to be the first, so they wait until one of them pushes someone else in so they’ll know if it safe or not.

And opportunism’s devil cousin is parasitism.
Perhaps the most horrific example of a parasite creature is the lamprey eel, a jawless parasitic marine animal with a toothed, funnel-like sucking mouth which they use to bore into the flesh of other fish and suck their blood. The oral apparatus of the adult lamprey is a sucking disk lined with whorls of over 100 of these teeth. They swim with the fish and literally feed on him until he dies, but are sometimes shaken off leaving the fish who usually dies from the wound or a later infection. And as if not cruel enough they also secrete two substances, one to prevent coagulation and the other to breakdown muscle tissues that are then sucked in as fluids.

After humans are gone, nonhuman animals would still murder, rape, and exploit each other for their own profit, just as they do now. Suffering is an inherent part of life. Someone will always suffer for someone else. As long as life exists, pain will too. As you know, the reason pain exists is that it is beneficial from an evolutionary point of view. Every single nerve signal communicating an animals' agony to their brain is beneficial to the being from an evolutionary standpoint, as it increases the chances that the animal will live long enough to produce offspring.
The history of the evolution of life on this planet has been written with pain and suffering. Survival and reproduction have been the only imperatives guiding the gradual changes in morphology which have given the various species their present forms and behavior. All the organisms are selfish. They all have been, they all are and they all will act in order to promote their own genes. That is what life is all about and consequently that is what all the living creatures are about.

The first natural cause of suffering that comes to mind is probably predation.
Predation is literally as old as life itself. It goes back to the most ancient life forms - single cell organisms.
As soon as there were living single cell organisms, one of their major functions was to acquire chemicals from their surroundings. Therefore those living mechanisms themselves were packed full of concentrated chemicals (the ones they have gathered and were made of). As time went by, some organisms by chance (mutation) instead of gathering scattered minerals, obtained them in a compact form by devouring the cells around them. This turned out to be an "efficient" "strategy".
About 3.5 billion years later there are fangs, claws, talons, venoms, webs, beaks, sonars, infra red vision, tentacles and slaughterhouses. This is life. As simple and technical as that.

Like in any other situation, only when we acknowledge the roots of the problem, will we be able to solve it, and the roots of the problem, the origin of the suffering, is in the mechanism of life itself.

Moral people do not stand idly while helpless creatures suffer. We can change it.

We don’t want to annihilate nonhuman animals or human animals.
Annihilation is the mean not the goal. We want a sufferingless world.
We don’t want battery cages, vivisection and slaughterhouses. And we don’t want caterpillars being eaten from the inside out by dozens of wasps' larva either.