Conservation and Animal Welfare: Aligning Goals

Conservation and animal welfare movements share common ground and can achieve more together than separately, despite some philosophical tensions.

Key Facts

Conservation focuses primarily on species and ecosystem level outcomes while welfare focuses on individuals
Reintroduction programmes for conservation can impose welfare costs on individual animals
Lethal predator control sometimes used in conservation conflicts with welfare principles
Many major welfare harms occur to wild animals outside conservation management
Wild animal welfare as a field is bridging the gap between conservation and welfare movements

Welfare Considerations

The relationship between conservation and welfare has been characterised by productive tension. Conservation justifications have sometimes been used to excuse welfare harms to individual animals for species-level benefits. Welfare concerns have sometimes been raised against necessary conservation interventions. The emerging field of wild animal welfare challenges both movements to take individual wild animal welfare more seriously while maintaining realistic expectations about natural processes. The aligned goal is a world where abundant wildlife thrives in high-quality habitat, experiencing lives that are worth living by any meaningful measure of welfare.

What You Can Do

Support conservation organisations that explicitly incorporate welfare standards in their work
Engage with the growing field of wild animal welfare as it develops evidence and policy frameworks
Advocate for welfare consideration in all conservation interventions affecting individual animals
Support research bridging conservation and welfare to develop integrated approaches to wild animal wellbeing