“…Inherently value-laden, religious terms are now frequently used in academic discourses about the ecological roles of large carnivores -terms such as hero, doctrine, dogma, demonising, virtuous, saviour, scapegoat, sanctification, sinners, and saints (e.g. Jones, 2002;Soulé et al, 2005;Anahita and Mix, 2006;Allen et al, 2011a;Letnic et al, 2011;Mech, 2012;Chapron and Lopez-Bao, 2014;Middleton, 2014;Johnson and Wallach, 2016). Unfortunately, but perhaps motivated by the dire status of many carnivore populations, a growing number of studies rely on weak inference when valuing the roles of large carnivores in ecosystems (e.g.…”