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In response Brian - full post here

I would agree with your assessment of our moral ability to constrain non-human animals in certain situations. I would compare our ability to interfere with the lives of non-humans to our ability to interfere with the lives of human children.

Human children certainly have conscious, physiological, and psychological interests. We have the moral ability, and perhaps even the moral obligation to prevent children from causing severe harm to themselves. We should prevent children from crossing busy roads, doing hard drugs, harming other people, et cetera. From this I suppose we'd have to conclude that we are obligated to take care of non-human animals in the same way. Though this might be dangerous if we take the argument to its absurd conclusion: we are morally obligated to prevent as much serious harm as we can.

I do wonder if, to get around this, we can make a distinction between the animals of whom we are guardians and animals who don't have guardians. The distinction seems (and probably is) irrelevant, but I can't see how we could avoid the aforementioned conclusion and its negative consequences.