Today I want to talk about compassionate conservation and whether it can or cannot work. For those who don't know, compassionate conservation is an idea proposed in which animals in conservation are treated ethically and the lives of individual animals are considered. If you didn't know already, there is killing that occurs in the name of conservation. Sometimes it's for the best and sometimes it's for science to pinpoint a problem. For example predators are likely to be killed if a particular prey is endangered. This occurs when the problem about whether the particular animal's population is declining and nobody knows why.What essentially compassionate conservation is proposing is that each animal's individual life should be considered and lethal methods shouldn't occur. Here is my opinion as to whether it can work or not.
Conservation is all about problem solving and depending on their severity, a rapid reaction may be needed. Although killing is never a good affair, it can help tackle and contain a problem very fast. In addition to that killing animals is sometimes the only option. Take the American mink and the gray squirrel for example. Both animals are invasive animals and the mink is doing significant damage to the Scottish wildlife as it is. Thus the only way to restore the ecosystem is to capture and kill the mink. So killing is a tool that should definitely be considered as part of conservation. By removing killing, you are unfortunately limiting the extend towards which conservationists can react to a problem.What is more, places like the U.K have no natural predators to regulate their deer population and so humans have to kill the deer in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and a healthy deer population.
However there are several flaws with considering killing. In a lot of circumstances killing animals in conservation is often a pre-emptive strike. Investigation for the causes for an animal's decline usually points towards predators before they do anything else and hence there may be a lot of unnecessary killing. In addition to that, sometimes killing animals may cause more issues. For example killing some wolves in a pack causes social disturbance which may end up with more lone wolves predating on livestock. Culling coyotes only leads to them breeding more as a response to death and in which case the problem isn't solved at all. In addition to that, animal killing isn't often specific enough to the animal and endangered species may also be killed in the process.
What I believe should occur is to assimilate compassionate conservation ideals to current conservation practises. Kill only when necessary and don't assume that killing will solve a problem. More research should be conducted before killing occurs. By placing value into individual animal lives, we may opt to kill animals which may not have a larger impact to the ecosystem(i.e not hierarchical dominant animals or mothers with young). Then again by doing so we providing value for animals and endanger labelling some animals as useless. So to conclude, in my opinion killing should only be used when other methods cannot be used and when killing occurs it should be done humanely and with the species' biology in mind.
