Compassionate conservation integrates individual animal welfare into conservation practice, challenging traditional approaches that sacrifice individuals for population outcomes.
Traditional conservation approaches that accept individual animal suffering for population or ecosystem benefits are challenged by compassionate conservation to consider whether equivalent outcomes can be achieved without that suffering. Individual animals matter morally regardless of their conservation status; an individual animal experiencing suffering deserves consideration whether or not their species is threatened. The compassionate conservation framework does not prohibit all intervention but asks conservation practitioners to demonstrate that welfare costs are necessary and minimised. This approach is changing how some conservation programs approach feral animal management, invasive species control, and population management.