Compassionate conservation is a framework that integrates individual animal welfare into conservation practice. It challenges lethal control as a default and centres the welfare of individual animals.
Compassionate conservation represents an important ethical evolution in conservation biology, bringing welfare considerations into a field that has traditionally focused on populations and ecosystems rather than individuals. The tension it identifies is real: conservation outcomes that benefit endangered native species sometimes require killing individual animals of other species. There are no easy answers, but the compassionate conservation framework usefully insists that such decisions should be made with explicit acknowledgment of the welfare cost, active pursuit of humane alternatives, and honest reckoning with the moral weight of individual lives.