I Am a Compassionate Conservation Welfare Scientist: Considering the Theoretical and Practical Differences Between Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare

Abstract

Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare are two disciplines whose practitioners advocate consideration of individual wild animals within conservation practice and policy. However, they are not, as is sometimes suggested, the same. Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare are based on different underpinning ethics, which sometimes leads to conflicting views about the kinds of conservation activities and decisions that are acceptable. Key differences between the disciplines appear to relate to their views about which wild animals can experience harms, the kinds of harms they can experience and how we can know about and confidently evidence those harms. Conservation Welfare scientists seek to engage with conservation scientists with the aim of facilitating ongoing incremental improvements in all aspects of conservation, i.e., minimizing harms to animals. In contrast, it is currently unclear how the tenets of Compassionate Conservation can be used to guide decision-making in complex or novel situations. Thus, Conservation Welfare may offer modern conservationists a more palatable approach to integrating evidence-based consideration of individual sentient animals into conservation practice and policy.

The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including Human–Animal Interactions in Assessments of Animal Welfare

“…Achieving or maintaining good health and fitness accompanied by a wide range of positive affective experiences ( Figure 4 ) involves using welfare-relevant husbandry practices (Domain 1), facilities design and environmental management (Domain 2) and veterinary attention (Domain 3). It also involves genetic selection for appropriate phenotypes to correct or avoid well-known functional impairments that have dire welfare consequences for production, companion and laboratory animals, and, as recently anticipated, for pest animals [ 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 ]. These and the previous observations in this section highlight two points: first, that factors included in the first three domains overlap due to the highly integrated functional interactivity within the body operating as an integrated entity ( Section 2.1 ), and second, that these three domains deal mainly with survival-critical conditions and their associated affects ( Section 2.3 ).…”

Emotion as a source of moral understanding in conservation

“…Although some of the discomfort with compassion evidently relates to its general emotionality, lingering questions about compassion itself, as specifically envisioned within a compassionate conservation approach, have also emerged as a source of unease (Rohwer & Marris 2019; Beausoleil 2020; Callen et al. 2020a; Santiago‐Ávila & Lynn 2020).…”

“…Many scientists affirm the importance of compassion in conservation (Oommen et al. 2019; Beausoleil 2020; Johnson et al. 2019), advancing a primarily consequentialist (i.e., outcome‐oriented) understanding of “compassion” as efforts that minimize pain caused by human action or inaction (Hampton et al.…”

“…2018; Hayward et al. 2019; Beausoleil 2020). Thus, these authors argue that it is compassionate to humanely harm select nonhuman individuals (usually members of populations introduced or augmented by human activity) to prevent the greater suffering they would otherwise cause or themselves experience.…”

Animal welfare science aids conservation

“…Animal welfare science is not synonymous with opposition to intentional killing of wildlife (compassionate conservation) (6,7). Rather, animal welfare science uses quantitative measurements to assess harmful and positive impacts of human activities on animals (8).…”