Recognizing animal personhood in compassionate conservation

Conservation Biology, 2019

Compassionate conservation focuses on 4 tenets: first, do no harm; individuals matter; inclusivity of individual animals; and peaceful coexistence between humans and animals. Recently, compassionate conservation has been promoted as an alternative to conventional conservation philosophy. We believe examples presented by compassionate conservationists are deliberately or arbitrarily chosen to focus on mammals; inherently not compassionate; and offer ineffective conservation solutions. Compassionate conservation arbitrarily focuses on charismatic species, notably large predators and megaherbivores. The philosophy is not compassionate when it leaves invasive predators in the environment to cause harm to vastly more individuals of native species or uses the fear of harm by apex predators to terrorize mesopredators. Hindering the control of exotic species (megafauna, predators) in situ will not improve the conservation condition of the majority of biodiversity even if compassionate conservationists do no harm to individuals of the exotic species. The positions taken by socalled compassionate conservationists on particular species and on conservation actions could be extended to hinder other forms of conservation, including translocations, conservation This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. fencing, and fertility control. Animal welfare is incredibly important to conservation, but ironically compassionate conservation does not offer the best welfare outcomes to animals and is often ineffective in achieving conservation goals. Consequently, compassionate conservation may threaten public and governmental support for conservation because of the general publics' limited understanding of conservation problems.

This article reviews Marc Bekoff’s book Ignoring Nature No More, and discusses the various human priorities which influence cruelty, harm and compassion towards wild nature and the animal kingdom.

Animals

Human activity affecting the welfare of wild vertebrates, widely accepted to be sentient, and therefore deserving of moral concern, is widespread. A variety of motives lead to the killing of individual wild animals. These include to provide food, to protect stock and other human interests, and also for sport. The acceptability of such killing is widely believed to vary with the motive and method. Individual vertebrates are also killed by conservationists. Whether securing conservation goals is an adequate reason for such killing has recently been challenged. Conventional conservation practice has tended to prioritise ecological collectives, such as populations and species, when their interests conflict with those of individuals. Supporters of the ‘Compassionate Conservation’ movement argue both that conservationists have neglected animal welfare when such conflicts arise and that no killing for conservation is justified. We counter that conservationists increasingly seek to adhere t...

Biological Conservation, 2020

Traditional conservation' customarily engages in the dismissal of individual non-human animal claims when these conflict with human interests or prevailing ideas of biodiversity. Emerging conservation paradigms, compassionate conservation (CC) and multispecies justice (MJ), concerned with the prevalence of harm to animals are challenging the normative and practical standards underlying this dismissal. We place these two emerging conservation paradigms in dialogue, highlighting their potential for convergence for appropriately considering nonhuman animal claims. We focus on some theoretical and practical tensions within both paradigms that may hinder their independent application. While we agree on the practice of compassion towards individuals as indispensable to ethics, we demonstrate how questions of harm ubiquitous in ethical dilemmas (situations of conflict) within conservation are inevitably intertwined with evaluations of competing human-animal claims potentially unsolvable only through compassion. Drawing on Mary Midgley's concept of the 'mixed-community' of species, we propose MJ as a complementary value promoting animal respect, dignity, and their appropriate consideration through the establishment of baseline duties to others. We recommend justice-promoting principles focused on recognizing different yet equitable sources of moral value (geocentrism), observing equitable consideration, evaluating harm and comparability of claims, among others. We proceed to discuss the limitations of justice, compassion and how we can correct for them, highlighting the indispensability of their simultaneous deployment. We conclude that a comprehensive conservation ethic should promote an ethics-of-care together with the codification and enforcement of animal claims so as to provide explicit ethical guidance in our mixedcommunity.

Published on Medium, 2019

Right from the 70s that environmental ethics gained its academic status, there had been two predominant contrary modes of thinking about the environment; viz: on the one hand, what obligations and responsibilities do humans have towards the environment in order to ensure the well-being of humans inhabiting it? And on the other hand, what moral obligations do humans have towards environmental entities themselves? This ideological division can be captured as a fight between anthropocentric environmentalists and their 'extensionist' counterparts. With regard to the ideological divides between the cohorts of anthropocentrism and extensionism therefore, and in particular response to the issue on whether humans have moral obligations to nature and non-human living beings, I argue that humans have ‘moral obligations’ only to beings in their own moral community (i.e. humans), and are required to extend ‘moral empathy’ to beings in other moral communities. The separation between ‘moral obligation’ and ‘moral empathy’ here was established by challenging two age-long views in environmental ethics; viz: that only humans have intrinsic worth, and that all intrinsically worthy beings demand equal moral worship.

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2018

Human interference to the environment is increasing day by day. As a result, the environment is facing complete destruction. Each member has an important role in the environment, they form a beautiful environment in harmony with each other. But human oppression destroyed and affected the other species of the environment. That's why the environment stand at the crucial point of the destruction today. Now we feel the urgency of analyzing it, when the environmental crises, like the exhaustion of natural resources and greenery, climate catastrophe, animal killings etc. are at doorstep. Human civilization has achieved significant progress in scientific, technological, industrial and economic fields, but all developments in these fields have been pursued, and are being pursued, at the high cost of exploitation and exhaustion of environment. Man cannot survive as a completely separate entity from the environment. Because the members of the environment are interdependent in relation to each other. So the environment must be protected. We have to protect other members of the environment as well as animals and to create a healthy and beautiful environment. Human are the most intelligent being of this world, who are capable of moral conduct. So they have responsibility to protect all members of the environment. We should overcome the narrowness of anthropocentric morality and to extend the circle of moral considerations to the ecocentic morality. The result will be a beautiful and healthy environment. In this paper, I will address the shortcomings of the anthropocentric approach to the moral consideration and try to show how the non-human beings can be included in moral consideration. That is, we will try to find a way to extend the circle of moral consideration from human-centric to leaving beings, where all living beings to be given respect. Finally, I will try to find out a guideline of on creating a healthy and peaceful environment through human friendly behavior towards animals by eliminating aggression and violence in society and environment.

Conservation Biology, 2019

Biological Conservation, 2020

The 'Compassionate Conservation' movement is gaining momentum through its promotion of 'ethical' conservation practices based on self-proclaimed principles of 'first-dono-harm' and 'individuals matter'. We argue that the tenets of 'Compassionate Conservation' are ideological-that is, they are not scientifically proven to improve conservation outcomes, yet are critical of the current methods that do. In this paper we envision a future with 'Compassionate Conservation' and predict how this might affect global biodiversity conservation. Taken literally, 'Compassionate Conservation' will deny current conservation practices such as captive breeding, introduced species control, biocontrol, conservation fencing, translocation, contraception, disease control and genetic introgression. Five mainstream conservation practices are used to illustrate the far-reaching and dire consequences for global biodiversity if governed by 'Compassionate Conservation'. We acknowledge the important role of animal welfare science in conservation practices but argue that 'Compassionate Conservation' aligns more closely with animal liberation principles protecting individuals over populations. Ultimately we fear that a world of 'Compassionate Conservation' could stymie the global conservation efforts required to meet international biodiversity targets derived from evidenced based practice, such as the Aichi targets developed by the Convention on Biological Diversity and adopted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the United Nations.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Compassionate Conservation" is an emerging movement within conservation science that is gaining attention through its promotion of "ethical" conservation practices that place empathy and compassion and the moral principles of "first, do no harm" and "individuals matter" at the forefront of conservation practice. We have articulated elsewhere how Compassionate Conservation, if adopted, could be more harmful for native biodiversity than any other conservation action implemented thus far, while also causing more net harm to individuals than it aims to stop. Here, we examine whether empathy, compassion and inflexible adherence to moral principles form a solid basis upon which to meet the goals of conservation biology as specified by pioneers in the discipline. Specifically, we examine a large empirical literature demonstrating that empathy is subject to significant biases and that inflexible adherence to moral rules can result in a "do nothing" approach. In light of this literature, we argue that our emotional systems have not evolved to provide a reliable basis for making decisions as to how best to ensure the long-term persistence of our planet. Consequently, in its most radical form, the Compassionate Conservation philosophy should not be enshrined as a legalized guiding principle for conservation action.

Conservation Biology, 2019