The Individual Animal Is In

A major conservation body just widened the circle of what conservation protects.

Photo by Gosia Bryja, Katmai National Park

For a long time, conservation and animal welfare were treated as opposed to one another. Conservation cared about populations, species, whole systems and their health. Animal welfare, on the other hand, cared about the individual animal and her well-being. Much of the conservation field held that the second concern got in the way of the first. Caring too much about one animal, the thinking went, was a soft-hearted distraction from the harder work of saving many.

The hierarchy of values was explicitly stated. In the 1986 book chapter “Wildlife Conservation and Animal Rights: Are They Compatible?”, Michael Hutchins and Christen Wemmer called the animal-rights position “biologically illiterate.” When the interests of the individual and the population collided, the individual was expected to give way.

The old divide

There were genuine reasons for the divide. Species do vanish; systems come apart. Conservation biology emerged in response to those losses, and its attention, again, settled on biological wholes rather than individual lives. In 1985, Michael Soulé described the emerging discipline as a crisis discipline and defined its purpose as supplying the principles and tools needed to preserve biological diversity.

Conservation biology did not, however, emerge in a vacuum. It entered a conservation tradition long shaped by the anthropocentric and utilitarian philosophy of “wise use” associated with Gifford Pinchot, under which nature was managed for sustained human benefit. It did not fully displace that older approach, but gave greater prominence to another reason for protecting nature: biodiversity had value in itself. Modern conservation has continued to draw on both lines of thinking. Nature deserves protection for its own sake and also because human well-being depends upon it.

The circle that this modern view of conservation drew ran through genes, populations, species, communities and ecosystems. The individual animal remained outside of the circle, because the ecological emergency was understood through disappearing populations and species rather than the fate of particular lives. In 2001, a paper published in Pacific Conservation Biology named the resulting divide directly in its title: “The conflict between animal welfare and conservation.” Once those concerns were framed as competing, the suffering or death of individuals became accepted as the price of protecting a population, species or ecosystem.

That logic entered policy on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. In 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service adopted a strategy under which as many as 450,000 barred owls could be killed over thirty years to protect northern and California spotted owls. In British Columbia, more than 2,800 wolves have been killed since 2015 under the guise of conserving mountain caribou, while the habitat destruction driving their decline has continued unabated. Ironically, the province itself identifies landscape disturbance, driven primarily by forestry, as the ultimate cause of the altered predator-prey relationship. Its own report acknowledges that killing wolves will not address the main causes of caribou decline without habitat protection and restoration. Yet the wolves remain the target.

Countless lives are thus sacrificed for others, with individual animals treated as expendable casualties once a population or species has been chosen for protection. Describing this approach while tracing the owl wars, journalist Warren Cornwall wrote that conservation’s history is “tinged with blood.”

What a population is made of

Compassionate conservation developed from the refusal to accept the presumed conflict between protecting individual animals and protecting populations or ecosystems as inevitable. It brought the welfare of individuals into conservation decisions and asked that harm be avoided wherever possible. It didn’t dismiss extinction, ecological collapse or the reality of difficult choices. It asked, instead, whether conservation had accepted harm too quickly, whether killing had become a solution of first resort rather than last, and whether populations and ecosystems could be protected without treating the individuals within them as disposable.

The approach took shape around the principle “First, do no harm.” Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, became one of compassionate conservation’s most prominent voices, arguing that scientific rigour and concern for individual animals need not be opposites. Guided by the principles that individuals matter and the notion that conservation should be inclusive and coexistence peaceful, compassionate conservation challenged the assumption that harm carried out in the name of a population or species was justified.

The response from the traditional conservation field was swift. Critics argued that compassionate conservation was impractical, insufficiently attentive to consequences for populations and ecosystems, and potentially even harmful because its principles constrained interventions considered necessary. Even the titles of the rebukes were blunt: “The Fatal Flaws of Compassionate Conservation” and “Deconstructing Compassionate Conservation.” The old division remained entrenched. Concern for the individual was still treated as something that obstructs conservation rather than enriches it.

And yet, the scientific case for acknowledging individual lives became harder to dismiss. Rapidly accumulating research in cognition, behaviour and social learning revealed animals as beings with agency, memory, personality and histories of their own. They learn, make decisions and respond differently to the world around them. They are sentient. They feel, they suffer, they seek what gives them pleasure and avoid what hurts, and their own lives matter to them.

The arguments were not merely ethical. They also applied to ecological processes. Within a population, some individuals are bold and exploratory while others are cautious and risk-averse, and that variation matters to the population as a whole. Many animals form societies held together by kinship, learning and shared knowledge, and much of what a population needs to survive may reside in its particular members: the individual who remembers where food can be found in a lean year, the experienced elder who carries a migration route, or the explorer who discovers a new resource when the old one fails.

Individuals matter. Remove them, and a population may remain numerically present but lacking in behavioural diversity, cultural knowledge and the capacity to adapt. The deaths of older and experienced animals can disrupt social structures, reproduction, migration and the transmission of survival knowledge. The loss of the individual and the weakening of the whole go hand in hand.

The circle widens

This relationship now appears to be gaining formal recognition within mainstream conservation. One of the Society for Conservation Biology’s regional sections, SCB North America, has moved the circle again. Its board approved a new definition of conservation on January 22, 2026, and the section published it on July 8, 2026. A press release announced the definition and explained its purpose. The accompanying Definition of Terms establishes what its central language means. Together, the documents present a vision intended to guide SCB North America, encourage discussion across the wider Society for Conservation Biology and speak to others interested in the protection and recovery of nature.

The definition states:

“Conservation is a practice informed by the best evidence-based science and place-based knowledge whose outcomes protect and restore the natural environment—including its air, soil, water, biological diversity, ecosystem processes, and evolutionary potential—to ensure equitable benefits derived from nature and safeguard its value for current and future generations of all life.”

The accompanying Definition of Terms makes clear what “all life” and “biological diversity” now include. The authors write:

“We specifically include the protection of individual nonhumans, because they have been historically ignored because of a conservation biology focus on populations or species, and an elevation of human needs above all other life.”

The language goes beyond animals understood collectively, as populations or species, and acknowledges and values individual living organisms of every kind. Long dismissed, the individual animal, an irreplaceable sentient being, becomes part of what conservation is for.

Importantly, the document also recognizes that an animal has value apart from human use. It states:

“each individual has its own interest separate from any human interest or extrinsic value” and places “the intrinsic value of each and every human alongside the intrinsic value of each and every nonhuman.”

For a section of a professional conservation society to adopt that language is no small thing. In essence, the bear’s life matters on the bear’s terms, not only on ours.

Of course, anyone who has spent time with wild animals has long known this. Each grizzly is a member of a population, a part of an ecosystem, and a carrier of genes into a future she will never see. And she is a being with a life story of her own, agency, preferences, relationships and moods, moving through the valley in her own way among others of her kind. Spend a season on one salmon river and you will learn to know her through more than a scar, a face or a patch of lighter fur. You will recognize the way she fishes, the way she crosses the current and the way she yields or holds her ground. The population is still there, but it is made of lives like hers, each more than a number, each carrying something of her own.

From resource to individual

The old boundary rendered individuality erasable. A bear disappeared as a living being and returned as a management unit, a renewable resource or a harvestable surplus. She was counted when numbers were needed and killed when she became inconvenient. She was real enough to shoot and abstract enough not to grieve.

By bringing the individual back into view, the new definition makes that reduction much harder to defend.

The newly published Definition of Terms also draws a distinction between uses necessary for organisms to survive or reproduce and human uses that serve nonessential wants. SCBNA acknowledges that one organism may need to survive or reproduce at the expense of another, but distinguishes this from some human uses that are “trivial,” specifically naming “recreation, trophy, luxury, etc.,” which are classified as threats rather than acceptable uses. That distinction is long overdue. By naming trophy use explicitly, SCBNA dispels the notion of its indispensability for conservation. The inclusion of recreation also raises a broader question about recreational activities that harm animals or the places they depend upon.

Who gets to claim conservation?

It is a watershed change. Hunters and hunting organizations have long justified killing through the language of stewardship, sustainable use and wildlife management, arguing that it protects populations or ecosystems. However, once individual nonhumans are recognized as having interests and intrinsic value of their own, population-level outcomes are no longer immune to scrutiny. Conservation must also ask what is being done to the individuals within those populations.

Not every death can be avoided. What changes is that ethical concern can no longer be dismissed as an emotional outburst or treated as something outside conservation. Instead, “First, do no harm” becomes a guiding principle: harm must be recognized, questioned and avoided wherever possible, not automatically justified through appeals to tradition, sustainability or population benefit.

That’s a harder standard but a fairer one. It won’t make difficult decisions disappear, but it changes what conservation reaches for first. Harm to individuals can no longer be treated as a routine subtraction from a population total.

This is where we are. Finally. For years, people who argued that conservation should include the individual were told that they were letting their hearts outrun the science. They were early advocates, and being early is easy to mistake for being wrong. The resistance was explicit and often dismissive. Yet in July 2026, SCB North America redefined its terms. Biological diversity now includes individual nonhuman animals.

None of this abandons conservation biology’s indispensable care for populations and ecosystems. It enlarges that care. The population remains vital, but the individual is no longer invisible. A field that spent decades treating care for the individual and care for the whole as a conflict may be beginning to recognize that they have always been the same animal.

References:

Armsworth, P. R., Chan, K. M. A., Daily, G. C., Ehrlich, P. R., Kremen, C., Ricketts, T. H., & Sanjayan, M. A. (2007). “Ecosystem-Service Science and the Way Forward for Conservation.” Conservation Biology, 21(6), 1383–1384. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00821.x.

B.C. Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. (2025). Predator Reduction to Support Caribou Recovery: 2024–25 Summary.
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Soulé, M. E. (1985). “What Is Conservation Biology?” BioScience, 35(11), 727–734. DOI: 10.2307/1310054.

Hutchins, M., & Wemmer, C. (1986). “Wildlife Conservation and Animal Rights: Are They Compatible?” In M. W. Fox & L. D. Mickley (Eds.), Advances in Animal Welfare Science 1986/87 (pp. 111–137). The Humane Society of the United States.

Fulton, G. R., & Ford, H. A. (2001). “The Conflict Between Animal Welfare and Conservation.” Pacific Conservation Biology, 7(3), 152–153. DOI: 10.1071/PC010152.

Cornwall, W. (2014, October 24). “There Will Be Blood.” Conservation Magazine, archived by Anthropocene Magazine.

Ramp, D., & Bekoff, M. (2015). “Compassion as a Practical and Evolved Ethic for Conservation.” BioScience, 65(3), 323–327. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biu223.

Wallach, A. D., Bekoff, M., Batavia, C., Nelson, M. P., & Ramp, D. (2018). “Summoning Compassion to Address the Challenges of Conservation.” Conservation Biology, 32(6), 1255–1265. DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13126.

Hayward, M. W., et al. (2019). “Deconstructing Compassionate Conservation.” Conservation Biology, 33(4), 760–768. DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13366.

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Bekoff, M. (2022). “Time to Stop Pretending We Don’t Know Other Animals Are Sentient Beings.” Animal Sentience, 31(2). DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1699.

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