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Animal Abuse Resulting from Wildlife Habitat Destruction Rob White Introduction Animal abuse occurs in different forms and takes place in diverse locations It is ubiquitous although there are important qualitative differences in regard to the nature, dynamics and seriousness of the harm as these pertain to particular nonhuman animal species The focus of this chapter is on the destruction of wildlife habitat and how this impinges upon the health and wellbeing of nonhuman animals Without a home in which to live or to which to migrate to, suffering and death is inevitable for nonhuman animals Destroying species homelands, therefore, is a profoundly harmful activity that intrinsically constitutes a form of animal abuse In this scenario, humans have a major role to play both as perpetrators of wildlife habitat destruction and as moral agents with the capacity to intervene in instances where habitat destruction originates from nonhuman sources The issue of who or what, precisely, causes certain habitat damage is an important consideration in the discussions below From the point of view of human causation, matters of power and profit tend to come to the fore in explanations of wide scale habitat destruction Human agency is also linked to decisions about whether or not to intervene to ‘save’ particular species from the competitive pressures generated by other nonhuman species R White (*) School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia e-mail: r.d.white@utas.edu.au © The Author(s) 2017 J Maher et al (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_12 249