Rewilding and Compassionate Conservation

By Kirk Robinson, Western Wildlife Conservancy   

Featured Image: Wild Horses, Utah West Desert (c) Kim Crumbo 

In his 1985 article “What is Conservation Biology?” Michael Soulé states three normative postulates of conservation biology: “diversity of organisms is good,” “ecological complexity is good,” and “evolution is good.” ‘Good’ is a normative term. We use it to make positive evaluations of various things, and most of us believe we ought to try to do what is good when we can. While these postulates cannot be tested or proven, in the words of Soulé they “. . . are value statements that make up the basis of an appropriate attitude toward other forms of life—an ecosophy (Naess, 1973).” As such, they are intended to serve as a moral basis for conservation, including of course rewilding.

These postulates probably strike most of us intuitively as true, but they are not uncontroversial. For example, most people believe that human flourishing is good although it sometimes harms other forms of life, even to the point of reducing diversity of organisms and ecological complexity. Modern agriculture, transportation, medical research, and energy production are examples. One can argue that we have taken this much too far, but my point is only that the different goods can and do conflict.

Another criticism—one sometimes made by advocates of “compassionate conservation”— is that the postulates do not include concern for the well-being of individual creatures. Too many conservationists—so the criticism goes—subordinate the good of individual creatures to the good of higher-level entities such as species and ecosystems. Individual creatures are deemed expendable; species and ecosystems are not. But why not? After all, a deer or a wolf is at least conscious and can experience pains and pleasures, while species and ecosystems cannot. (“Compassionate Conservation, Sentience, and Personhood”) This is a point worth heeding, but the implications are not obvious. My purpose in this article is to explore the implications.

Surely most people will agree that we should strive to protect ecosystems and species, as well as avoid causing unnecessary harm to individual creatures, while also promoting human flourishing (not by ceaseless population growth, but by improving the quality of life for all people). Each has a moral claim on us. In what follows I shall not address human flourishing further, except to observe that we have reached a point where any future human flourishing will depend more than ever on a flourishing natural world, making conservation and preservation more important than ever.

Rewilding is a conservation strategy that focuses on restoring damaged ecosystems to a healthier pre-damage state. It has been described as healing ecological wounds—wounds inflicted on the land and its community of life by us humans. (“​Ecological Wounds of North America,” Rewilding.org) This often requires active efforts to restore something needed for healthy ecological functioning, such as reintroducing wolves to habitats from which they have been extirpated, or removing exotic creatures, e.g., horses, cats, and goats, from habitats they have invaded.

By contrast, compassionate conservation emphasizes the importance of individual creatures. Its first principle, “Do No Harm,” is an injunction against causing suffering and death to sentient creatures. (“What is Compassionate Conservation?”) So, at least in emphasis, compassionate conservation is radically different from rewilding.

Passive rewilding is effective at times—for example, terminating livestock grazing to allow recovery of a riparian system. But many rewilding projects require active intervention that will unavoidably impact individual creatures, often in harmful ways. For example, reintroduction of wolves to former habitats typically involves capturing and sedating them, removing them from their home ground and from their family groups (unless the entire family group is captured and translocated together), then releasing them onto unfamiliar ground. Injuries and trauma are bound to occur and there might be fatalities. Similarly, reducing wild (some would say feral) horse and burro populations is harmful to the animals when it involves helicopter roundups and chemical or surgical sterilization. Even more so if animals are injured in the process, are confined for long periods in holding pens, or end up dog food. So, also, for eradicating exotic goats or cats from an island, which might entail outright killing them.

Proponents of rewilding accept some harm to individual creatures as the necessary cost of healing ecological wounds, which they regard as a higher good justifying the harm. Compassionate conservation, on the other hand, with its injunction against causing suffering, injury, or death to sentient creatures, appears incompatible with rewilding. Interpreted strictly, it allows only for passive restoration. In fact, the best way to ensure that you do no harm is to do nothing at all.

Intrinsic Value

At issue is how to determine what sorts of entities have moral standing so that we have an obligation to treat them in certain ways and not others—such as our obligation to treat dogs compassionately and not abusively. Let us grant, first, that human beings have moral standing. Then, by extension, we might include other species of animal because in important respects they are like humans, e.g., are conscious, intelligent, experience pains, pleasures, and emotions, have a point of view on the world, seek some things, avoid others, and so on. It follows that we should not harm them without a compelling reason. Perhaps we even have an obligation to help them out in some circumstances.

The catch-all term intrinsic value is often used for the kinds of properties, features, and capacities that most of us believe give creatures moral standing. But what about ecosystems and species? Do they possess intrinsic value? They are not conscious, not intelligent, do not experience pains, pleasures, or emotions, do not have a point of view on the world, do not seek some things and avoid other things, etc. They have their own amazing features, to be sure, but how are we to go about determining whether those features amount to intrinsic value? Is it all just a matter of personal sentiment? The case is even worse for species than for ecosystems, since, apart from the individual members comprising them, species are mere abstractions, and it seems nonsensical to speak of an obligation owed to an abstraction. Even if we conceive of a species, not as an abstraction, but as numerous concrete individuals of a kind, and granting also that we have an obligation not to kill creatures without good reason, do we have an additional obligation to not kill all of them—that is, an additional obligation to not bring about the extinction of the species? The idea seems moot, since not killing any of them would suffice. The point is that the notion of intrinsic value, attractive as it might be, is philosophically problematic. It is hard to say what it is, let alone give criteria for it. It might just be a metaphysical fiction.

Some ethicists argue that ecosystems and species lack moral standing precisely because they are so unlike sentient creatures that they lack intrinsic value. On this view, we should preserve ecosystems and species, not because we have obligations to them, but solely because we should not harm sentient creatures. Fine. But preservation is not the same as rewilding. Preservation is hands-off; rewilding is hands-on. The question is, if ecosystems and species lack moral standing, then why should we engage in rewilding, particularly given the harm it will cause to some creatures? Maybe we should not do it.

If we dislike this conclusion, we need to find an alternative view. How about this. Despite lack of proof of the foundational claims about intrinsic value, intuition speaks strongly to many of us in favor of their truth, so let’s posit that healthy ecosystems possess intrinsic value of their own, such that rewilding is a good thing on a par with, say, rehabilitating an injured person or animal; and let’s posit that rewilding helps insure against species extinction, which is a good thing because species possess intrinsic value. We simply accept these posits without argument, just as we do Soulé’s normative postulates. Taken together they form a more complete rewilding ethic. Most of us find this satisfactory—maybe not fully satisfying, but satisfactory.

A Second Alternative View

Native American petroglyph: wolf pursuing bighorn sheep. (c) Kirk Robinson

There is another way to look at rewilding, starting with the fact that rewilding an ecosystem improves the lives of the creatures that depend on it by promoting conditions that are better for them. If this is right, then although rewilding might harm some creatures, it will benefit a great many more, including both those presently existing and those of the future. And this is presumably enough to outweigh the harm done to some. Rewilding can then be reckoned good—if not morally obligatory, at least morally laudatory.

In contemplating this it helps to remember that an ecosystem, even one damaged by humans, is the product of millions of years of evolution. The result is a huge diversity of organisms in relations of great ecological complexity, where each species has a niche in which its individual members enjoy optimal fit with the habitat—that is, where they enjoy the greatest prospect of living their lives according to their inherent natures. If we now add the entirely plausible premise that this kind of life is what constitutes the highest good for a wild creature, we have a strong moral justification for rewilding. The key here is to realize that the concept ‘good’ is not equivalent to the concept ‘not bad’. It is much more expansive.

If I understand her, philosopher Christine Korsgaard would endorse this view. (Korsgaard, C. 2018. Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals. Oxford University Press.) Korsgaard starts with the assumption, which she believes to be true, that nothing is good-in-itself; rather, whatever is good is good for someone or some creature (or in the case of instruments, good for some purpose). When we say without qualification, as we frequently do, that something is good, all we are really saying is that it is good for something or someone, or that we approve of it or like it. We are not saying that it is good without qualification, even if we think we are. Another way of putting this point might be to say that the attribution of intrinsic value is illusory—we think we are saying something about objective reality, but we are not. However, Korsgaard has no need to invoke the notion of intrinsic value because in her view a good life is not one that is good-in-itself, but one that is good for the creature whose life it is. And a life lived according to its inherent nature is in fact the “final” or absolute good for a creature. For example, the best life for a zebra or a lion is not one lived in captivity, even with easy meals and medical care, but one lived in the wild with plenty of nourishing grass for the zebra and plenty of zebras for the lion. As Korsgaard puts it, “Life is a good, existence is a good—except when it is bad—and that is not a tautology!” In other words, life is good even though nature be “red in tooth and claw.” In fact, this reality makes for the best possible kind of life for both zebra and lion because it is the kind of life they are made for. (Human beings are a different case owing to our apparently unique capacity for engaging in reevaluation and potential revision of our values—a separate topic that I will not get into.)

Interestingly, while this view does not depend on the notion of intrinsic value, it is not incompatible with such a view. A person can reasonably hold both views simultaneously. You can believe that individual creatures have intrinsic value and also believe that the highest possible good for a creature is a life lived according to its inherent nature. If you want to, you can even think of its potential for such a life as what gives a creature intrinsic value. The chief value of Korsgaard’s argument, I believe, is that it provides a more rationally compelling, and therefore more intellectually satisfying, basis for rewilding than does intuition alone. And it takes us far beyond “First do no harm.”

There is another important aspect of Korsgaard’s view that is a corollary of the other two. If all good is “good for” and if the best life for a creature is one lived according to its inherent nature, then cross-species comparisons of what constitutes a good life are totally misguided. If a lion kills a zebra, that is good for the lion and bad for the zebra, but there is no independent point of view from which we can say that the lion’s life is better or more important than the zebra’s. The lion’s life is better for it and the zebra’s life is better for it, that’s all. Similarly, it makes no sense to think or say that your life is better or worse than the life of a porcupine, no matter how good your life is or how bad the porcupine’s is because there is no independent point of view from which such evaluations can be made. Philosopher John Stuart Mill was therefore wrong when he asserted “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” On the other hand, Mill might have been right when he immediately followed with the further claim that it is “. . . better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” At least the second claim is not a cross-species comparison.) (Mill, J.S. 1863. Utilitarianism. London.)

The view that we humans have a right to treat other animals however we wish because we are superior to them rests on the same false assumption that there is a creature-independent point of view. The import of this fact is that we humans have no greater (or lesser) right to life than do other creatures and our lives are no more (or less) important than theirs. This is consonant with and provides justification for Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches here and there. Oxford University Press.) The whole point of rewilding is to do just this.

Compassionate Rewilding

Native American petroglyph: cougar (c) Kirk Robinson

From the foregoing we can extrapolate a rule: Engage in rewilding but try hard not to harm creatures when doing so. We might call this the rule of compassionate rewilding. No doubt it will seem quite inadequate to many. Of what possible practical importance is it? How can we use it as a guide? We want certainty in our moral judgments and this doesn’t seem to offer much help.

However, the world is not simple and no simple rule is going to yield moral certainty in every application. The value of this crude rule is that it can help us appreciate the relevant facts of a particular case as we design and carry out rewilding projects. Consider the passage of Proposition 114 in Colorado, which mandates the reintroduction of gray wolves to the west slope of Colorado. Since the passage of 114, an important question has come to the fore among wolf advocates: Should we or should we not tolerate killing wolves at the behest of livestock growers, ostensibly to protect livestock?

Applying our rule, here is my provisional answer for your consideration: There should be no killing of wolves for preying on livestock. Certainly, if there were no wolves at all, then livestock will not be killed by them, but that is not the issue, since wolves have at least as much right to inhabit the land as exotic creatures like cows. Of first importance is the fact that killing wolves causes death and suffering to the animals, which, far from being compassionate, is cruel. It can only be justified, if at all, on the condition that it can be counted on to prevent the death of livestock animals—and further, that there are no feasible alternatives for doing so. The available evidence, however, indicates that killing a wolf that has preyed on livestock can only be counted on to prevent that wolf from doing so again, not to prevent other wolves from doing it—not for long anyway. It can also be counterproductive, for should a provider member of the pack be killed, leaving other members to fend for themselves, a cycle of livestock predation and revenge wolf killing might be perpetuated. Instead, ranchers should use available nonlethal methods for preventing livestock predation, thereby eliminating much unnecessary suffering of their own animals as well as to wolves. In return, there can be state-guaranteed compensation for verified losses of livestock to predation. (This last part—state compensation for verified losses—is required by 114.) Finally, we also ought to consider that killing wolves will to some extent interfere with the rewilding project and the good it promises to bring about. My conclusion: On balance, there is no good reason for applying “lethal control” to wolves in response to their preying on livestock, but good reasons not to.

Please note that I have tried to state this in a way that does not absolutely rule out the possibility of justified non-revenge killing of wolves that prey on livestock. Whether there can actually be a case like this, however, and what the details might be, are another matter.

Now what about wild horses and burros? First, we must note that these creatures are protected under the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Wiping them out is not an option, even if they are an invasive species as many believe. Thus, true rewilding might be off the table. (I’m not going to try to adjudicate the “wild” vs. “feral” debate.) Besides, equids are hardly the only invasive critters on the public lands, so complete rewilding would necessarily require more than just their removal! Hundreds of thousands of cows and sheep would have to go too. If herd numbers must be reduced—and I’ll leave that an open question—then it should be done as humanely as possible. What might this involve? Well, one exciting possibility worth considering is to one, reintroduce wolves and two, end mountain lion hunting. This strikes me as an experiment worth trying before we resort to more extreme, barbaric, and cruel measures.

Here’s why. Some mountain lions will specialize in taking horses in the rougher terrain where springs and seeps are typically located—places that also happen to provide stalking cover for successful ambush attacks. This will give horses an incentive to spend as little time as necessary in such places, therefore spending more time in flatter terrain where wolves will prey on the weaker members of the herd. Together, the two apex predators will put a squeeze on the equids to thin the herd and keep them on the move. There are places where this might well be sufficient by itself to “control” the size of a herd without any need for human intervention. (“Environmental influences on movements and distribution of a wild horse (Equus caballus) population in western Nevada, USA: a 25-year study“) It will have three very important additional benefits as well: It will (1) be the least expensive option by far, (2) will result in the restoration of riparian ecosystems, and not least, (3) will be humane. Everything speaks for it, nothing against it—except of course the livestock industry, which doesn’t like “wild” horses and burros, mountain lions, or wolves.

Kirk Robinson

Kirk grew up in Bountiful, Utah between the shore of the Great Salt Lake and the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. As a child, he loved roaming the foothills looking for wild animals and visiting Farmington Bay Bird Refuge. Naturally, he fell in love with the land and its wildlife. Since those early years, he has spent a big part of his life exploring the deserts, rivers, and mountains of the West.

In the 1990s, Kirk and some friends from the Utah Wilderness Association began working to reform Utah wildlife governance and management to make it more democratic, ecologically sound, and compassionate. This led to the founding of a non-profit organization, Western Wildlife Conservancy, to address the issues. Of particular concern is the scientifically and ethically misguided way that native carnivores such as mountain lions, black bears, and gray wolves are treated. The vital role that these intelligent and magnificent creatures play in maintaining the health of ecosystems goes unappreciated, as evidenced by a long history of persecution. In addition to being Executive Director of Western Wildlife Conservancy, Kirk is on the Leadership Council of The Rewilding Institute and the Advisory Committee of Wildlife For All.

Prior to Western Wildlife Conservancy, Kirk was a Professor of Philosophy. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cincinnati and has taught at universities in Montana and Utah. In 2004, he graduated from the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah with a certificate in Natural Resource Law to better equip him for work on wildlife conservation issues. In his free time, he enjoys backpacking, x-c skiing, river trips, playing the acoustic guitar, and time spent with friends and with his dog Bingo.