Conservation has long asked what must be done to protect species and ecosystems. Animal welfare asks an additional, and sometimes inconvenient, question: what happens to the individual animal in the process?
Asking that question can attract surprisingly dismissive labels. “Greenie” is one. “Radical” is the more respectable version. Both tend to appear when awkward questions are raised about individual animals where the larger conservation objective is assumed to settle the ethical argument.
Recognising that tension does not mean denying that conservation sometimes requires difficult decisions. It plainly does. Nor must the interests of an individual invariably trump those of a population, species or ecosystem. The problem lies in becoming too comfortable with the assumption that invoking “conservation” somehow settles the matter.
Conservation intervention often involves harm
Modern conservation emerged from a tradition concerned principally with populations, species and ecological systems. Its great intellectual figures taught us to think beyond the individual organism. That was enormously important, but it also helped create an ethical landscape in which harm to individual animals could relatively easily be understood as regrettable but necessary.
Conservationists kill invasive animals and cull populations regarded as excessive, sometimes for compelling reasons. Yet even where such interventions can be justified, their ethical cost does not disappear. Necessity may justify harm; it does not render that harm morally neutral. Nor does describing an action as “conservation” transform an ethical choice into a scientific inevitability.
Science can help establish the consequences of acting or not acting. It can tell us about population trajectories, genetics, disease and ecosystem function. What it cannot do, by itself, is determine what ought to be done with that knowledge. That remains an ethical question.
The inconvenient individual
Animal welfare introduces another perspective because its primary concern is not the species or population but the individual animal experiencing the consequences of human actions. Animals experience fear, pain, frustration and loss of control, but also comfort, curiosity, pleasure and positive engagement. Modern welfare science therefore extends well beyond food, health and freedom from obvious suffering to affective state, behavioural opportunity, positive experience, choice and control.
This creates an uncomfortable collision: a conservation intervention can be biologically successful while imposing extensive welfare costs on the animals involved.
Recognising those costs does not automatically mean the intervention should not occur. It means they belong in the calculation. Yet that challenges the assumption that a desirable population-level outcome necessarily provides sufficient ethical justification for whatever is required to achieve it.
Enter the ‘radicals’
One attempt to confront this tension has emerged as Compassionate Conservation. It developed from concern that conventional conservation focuses upon populations, species and ecosystems while paying insufficient attention to the individual animals affected. Its advocates have promoted principles such as “first, do no harm” and “individuals matter”.
It has been controversial. Critics argue that rigid application could prevent interventions sometimes necessary to protect biodiversity. Those concerns have validity. “Do no harm” is an attractive principle until every available option involves harm, when it becomes considerably less useful as a guide.
Nonetheless, Compassionate Conservation forces conventional conservation to confront an important question: does the individual animal matter morally in its own right, or only insofar as it contributes to the population, species or ecosystem humans have decided to conserve?
What is revealing is how quickly insisting that the individual remains morally relevant can be characterised as naïve, sentimental or radical. “Greenie” performs much the same function, only less politely. Label the person, and the argument no longer needs answering.
The argument is not that animals should never be harmed. Harm cannot always be avoided. Nature itself is hardly harmless. The harder question is what degree of harm humans are justified in imposing upon an individual animal, for what purpose, under what circumstances, and what alternatives are available.
Sustainable for whom?
In South Africa this tension is particularly apparent around sustainable utilisation. At its simplest, the proposition is reasonable: biological resources may be used provided that the rate and manner of use do not cause long-term decline or undermine ecological systems.
The difficulty comes when “sustainable” quietly becomes synonymous with “ethically justified.” They are not the same thing. A population can be harvested sustainably while individual animals experience considerable suffering. An activity can generate revenue for conservation, landowners or communities without that benefit necessarily establishing the ethical legitimacy of the means by which it is generated. Demonstrating that an activity does not threaten a population answers only one part of the ethical question.
South African environmental law has begun to grapple with this distinction. Amendments to the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act require animal well-being to be considered in management, conservation and sustainable use. On 9 October 2026, the Constitutional Court dismissed a challenge to these provisions by the South African Hunters and Game Conservation Association. The Court found that the challenge had been brought unreasonably late; it regarded its prospects of success as doubtful but did not finally determine its merits.
The judgment is significant but should not be overstated. It does not establish that animal well-being automatically prohibits hunting, culling or other interventions. Nonetheless, it leaves intact legislation that expressly recognises animals’ mental health and quality of life. Consequently, invoking sustainability does not, in itself, justify disregarding the welfare of individual animals.
This raises a more fundamental issue. Too often, the use of wildlife is regarded as a given. The decision to use has already been made, while the prior question — whether that use is morally defensible — quietly disappears. “Sustainable use” then risks becoming a convenient means of legitimising practices whose intrinsic merit has never been seriously questioned.
The issue is not sustainable utilisation itself. Ecological sustainability can indicate whether a use can continue without undermining a biological resource. It does not establish whether it ought to be done, whether the manner in which it is done is acceptable, or whether the costs imposed upon individual animals are justified.
Perhaps the concept deserving greater attention is “sustainable conservation”: conservation capable of enduring not only ecologically and economically, but ethically and socially. If conservation depends upon practices increasingly at odds with social expectations around the treatment of animals, biological sustainability alone may not make the conservation model sustainable in the broader sense.
Public sentiment should not dictate conservation science, any more than science alone can settle questions of ethics. However, social legitimacy, animal well-being and ethical coherence cannot indefinitely be treated as troublesome additions to the “real” business of conservation.
Asking what happens to the individual animal does not require abandoning conservation, rejecting sustainable use or pretending difficult choices can always be avoided. It simply requires acknowledging that conserving a species and caring about the animals who constitute it are not the same ethical question, and neither makes the other disappear.
If asking both questions makes conservationists uncomfortable, perhaps that discomfort is not radicalism at all, but the necessary consequence of taking their ethical responsibilities seriously. DM
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