The biodiversity crisis and animal welfare crisis are deeply interconnected. Understanding how biodiversity loss affects animal welfare and vice versa helps identify interventions that address both simultaneously.
The biodiversity crisis kills individual animals in their billions through habitat loss, fragmentation, pollution and direct human persecution. Each of these processes involves welfare costs - starvation, predation in exposed habitat, resource competition and displacement. Conservation biology has historically focused on species and population-level outcomes without attending to the welfare of individual animals. The emerging field of compassionate conservation seeks to reconcile these frameworks by recognizing that effective biodiversity conservation should also minimize unnecessary suffering of individual animals. Conflicts can arise - invasive species control that benefits native biodiversity involves killing the invasive animals - but the integration of welfare thinking into conservation practice improves both the ethics and sometimes the effectiveness of conservation interventions.