Authors: Katz, Tristan;

The literatures on wild animal suffering and on compassionate conservation both strive to take the moral status of wild animals seriously. But the former is championed by philosophers; the latter by conservation scientists – and there has been to date no cross-pollination between them. While compassionate conservationists advocate for greater concern for the harms which conservation inflicts on wild animals, the literature on wild animal suffering points out that wild animals suffer all the time, even without human intervention. If real compassion means being concerned with suffering no matter how it is caused, then the surprising consequence is that compassion challenges conservation itself. While compassion will justify conservation where human activity can be said to be the greatest cause of suffering, in most cases this is in fact not so; rather, most suffering is a result of evolutionary and reproductive processes. Compassion should therefore motivate us to look for new ecological setups, and some suggestions are given. While the practical consequences of this new approach require greater investigation, what is stressed is that an ideological switch is needed, such that decisions in environmental management are justified based on their expected impacts both in terms of anthropogenic and natural suffering.