Absolutely. Most of the philosophers are, as I am, utilitarians, so they wish to reduce net suffering to the greatest extent possible. All of them, of course, are vegans.
David Pearce is one of the main proponents of this idea, and promotes abolishing all involuntary suffering both humans and nonhuman animals.
The best summary of his views is contained in
this article, in my view. As he states in his typically sophisticated manner:
"I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event — perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence. "Jeff McMahan is another philosopher who has written on this topic, in
this New York Times piece. He responds to some of the typical objections to phasing out predators in
this follow-up piece.
Brian Tomasik has founded the
Foundational Research Institute, which aims to research how we can best reduce suffering in the far-future. One of the main concepts it focuses on is how to reduce and eliminate wild-animal suffering.
All of this has led Animal Charity Evaluators, an independent charity evaluator looking at animal charities, to
discuss wild-animal suffering too.
Peter Singer, a more familiar utilitarian philosopher and perhaps the father of the animal liberation movement, is more cautious, but obviously states that if "in some way, we could be reasonably certain that interfering with wildlife in a particular way would, in the long run, greatly reduce the amount of killing and suffering in the animal world, it would, I think, be right to interfere."
Obviously, making predators extinct - or genetically engineering them in order to turn them into herbivores - would be a massive technological project, and we would have to continually painlessly sterilise some herbivores in the wild, too, to prevent overpopulation and therefore starvation. But, I'm reasonably confident that, in a few centuries time, it wouldn't be too difficult to achieve this. I would agree with the ethicist Oscar Horta that “our job now is to prepare the grounds for forthcoming generations to take action where we may be currently unable to act.”
This mainly includes, at the moment, reaching out to vegans and vegetarians who have already acted rationally in rejecting speciesism.
For an overview, the
wild-animal suffering Wikipedia page is good. There's also a Facebook group called "reducing wild-animal suffering".