Compassionate conservation is an emerging framework that places individual animal welfare alongside population-level conservation goals, challenging traditional practices including lethal culling.
Compassionate conservation challenges the assumption, common in traditional conservation, that individual animal welfare can be sacrificed for population-level or ecosystem-level goals. Culling of native animals to protect endangered species, lethal control of invasives, and population management practices that cause individual suffering are scrutinised through a welfare lens. The framework does not prohibit interventions that cause individual harm when there is compelling conservation justification, but it requires that harm to individuals be explicitly acknowledged and minimised, and that non-lethal alternatives be seriously explored. The integration of welfare ethics into conservation represents a maturation of the discipline.