Wolf Stories: Killing in the name of conservation

In this Wolf Stories article, we’ve interviewed Sara Dubois (PhD), Chief Scientific Officer with the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BC SPCA) and Adjunct Professor in the Applied Biology program at the University of British Columbia. With more than 20 years of experience in the non-profit sector and academia, Sara has contributed to legislation and policy changes that have reduced suffering of animals, such as improving animal bylaws and regulations, increasing accountability of animals used for science, and developing ethical standards for animal industries. In this interview, we discuss the International Consensus Principles for Ethical Wildlife Control and how to apply this framework to decision-making for wildlife management and conservation dilemmas, such as killing one species to save another.

This interview was conducted in spring 2023 and has been edited for length and clarity.

What is wildlife control and how does it relate to wildlife management and conservation?

Often the concepts of wildlife control, wildlife management, and wildlife conservation are considered the same, and they’re not teased apart. People will conflate wildlife management with conservation, perhaps because that’s what you hear from government about what they’re doing, and therefore, you assume that government is guided by conservation goals. Conservation aims to protect and increase biodiversity of species and populations through applied science and value-based decisions, and that’s what government should do on our behalf. Wildlife management is what they do on a day-to-day basis to regulate wildlife use. 

These systems were built from the generations of “let’s manage wildlife for our own benefit,” and that’s what wildlife management is—managing populations of animals for human benefits, reducing conflict or allowing opportunities for harvest (i.e., hunting and trapping) or wildlife viewing. Even though we have conservation departments and conservation officers, what they’re actually doing is wildlife management. 

“Wildlife control can be summarized as the poisoning, trapping, hazing, deterring, exclusion, relocation, translocation, and/or killing of wild animals implemented in an effort to restrict animal activity to address perceived or actual human-wildlife conflict (i.e., public health and safety, property or crop protection, nuisance) or as a conservation strategy.”

Sara Dubois, 2020

As a significant tool in the toolbox of both conservation and wildlife management, wildlife control can be used in either context, but it’s often used improperly to describe a goal of conservation that is actually a goal of wildlife management. That’s where it’s important to tease out the terminology because it can be wrapped in “conservation is good; therefore, this must be okay because we’re achieving a higher goal of conservation,” when in fact it’s often wildlife management to serve a human benefit.

It’s been the playbook of how people were taught to do conservation, through wildlife management—we’re going to achieve conservation goals through managing wildlife and use a very traditional and colonial framework, the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which we know is problematic. That’s not going to help us necessarily achieve conservation goals for biodiversity. And then wildlife control, again, is a tool in either, but at the same time, it is used differently and may have various outputs as a result.

What are the different types of wildlife control?

When we use wildlife control as a tool, it can be to manage populations of unwanted wildlife, or even species that are deemed desirable, popular, and even iconic—i.e., the wanted wildlife. 

There are different types of control. For example, if you think of control as an intervention to manage the movement or behaviour of animals (i.e., we’re actually trying to control what these animals do), that can be done in various ways. Killing animals is one strategy, which frequently is softened into terms such as culling, harvesting, dispatching, eradication, or removal. Non-lethal techniques are different types of practices to prevent animals from coming into specific areas or reduce certain behaviours, such as exclusion and humane hazing. Wildlife control doesn’t have to be lethal, but in most circumstances when it’s used in wildlife management, it is. Lethal control can be controversial because often inhumane and ineffective strategies are used to kill targeted animals. Wolf management in BC is an example of this. 

Can you talk a bit about the language used to reference the killing of animals in the name of conservation? 

I abhor the term euthanasia when we talk about killing wildlife. This is a problem across our sector. You’ll hear it specifically in the media. It is used as a term to soften, to make it land easier for the general public, to say that these animals were euthanized. You’ll hear conservation officers say this. You’ll hear wildlife managers say this. You’ll hear veterinarians say this. Though it should only be used to describe the killing of an animal to relieve its suffering. If an animal is dying from disease or starvation, or suffering from critical injuries, and humanely killing that animal ensures that it’s not in pain and suffering anymore, it’s a “good” death, right? That is euthanasia.

Death is an animal welfare issue because animals have an interest in experiencing life. It can be quick and efficient and the aim may be a “good” death because it will relieve pain and suffering. The term euthanasia, particularly when considering an animal’s welfare state, should really only be used to define humanely killing an animal for its own benefit.

It’s okay to talk about humane killing, and that’s the terminology we don’t often hear in the public sphere. Whether it’s the media, wildlife managers, conservationists, they don’t want to talk about humane killing because that sounds bad. No one wants to use the term killing, but that’s what it is. We need to call it like it is.

If we’re making a decision to kill animals not for their own benefit, but for our needs whatever they may be, then we should talk about humane killing. “Can this animal be killed humanely” is a question that you can answer because the humaneness of an animal’s death can be measured. That’s what animal welfare science is there for. But whether or not this animal ought to be killed is a whole other conversation about ethics. So, the how and why need to be parsed apart. 

How do labels affect our treatment of animals and the ways in which they are controlled?

Labels are really important, and that’s why they were included in the International Consensus Principles for Ethical Wildlife Control. We have this assumption that if an animal is “bad,” it’s okay to kill it. We don’t have to ask why anymore and we achieve it with any means necessary. It’s this self-justification that, “oh, it’s not the best way to kill the animal, but we really should because it’s a bad animal.” And so people have various value systems and assign “bad” terminology, whether it’s pest, nuisance, or hyperabundant. We give these animals labels and then we say that that justifies their removal, that justifies their killing.

Contrast that to the “good” animals, the ones that we like or want. To control a population of elk or moose for example, we are intervening in their behaviour maybe by putting up highway fencing to protect these populations. And maybe we’re controlling another species, such as wolves, to augment their populations. They are desired. They are conserved. Their populations are managed to grow so that we can hunt them, and then there’s still some left.

“These labels can perpetuate myths and undermine empathy development; in extreme cases, such as when bounties are encouraged, the culture of killing is celebrated and may desensitize children and adults to acts of violence.”

Sara Dubois, 2020

I’ve worked a lot with pest control operators, and many are ingrained with what species are “good” and what are species are “bad” so that they can justify to their customers, “it’s okay to kill these animals with horrible poisons. We would never do this to your cat or dog, give these poisons that make them hemorrhage internally for days. But we can do it to rodents because they’re “bad,” they’re dirty, and they cause disease that affects humans.” But guess what, all wild animals can carry certain types of diseases or parasites, it’s just because we’ve given rodents these labels.

The same perceptions happen with wolves or other carnivore species. We’ve said that these animals are bad in certain circumstances when they get onto a farm and take farmed animals. That’s giving them a “bad” label that is not actually inherent to the property of that animal. So, it’s really important to take away those labels, to really look at the animal itself and its behaviours independent of what people think of it.

What is ethical and humane when it comes to controlling wildlife?

Humaneness we can measure. That’s what animal welfare measures: quality of life. You can measure how an animal dies in terms of its stress and physiology, the suffering—the degree to which the pain hurts them, the severity of it, the duration of it. There are actual measurements to understand what is humane. 

Some people will also apply the ethical consideration of why. Not necessarily animal welfare scientists or conservationists, but the general public may understand humane to be something different, which is why we tried to separate out the different definitions of humane.

“Legally humane” is one definition I often have to explain to people because the BC SPCA is an animal protection agency. The minimum legal standard for humaneness and what we can investigate as cruelty, is defined by federal and provincial laws and generally accepted practices of industry. But that doesn’t mean it is “scientifically humane” because science can measure what is humane. So, that’s what I’m looking at as an animal welfare scientist when I’m asking “is this procedure or intervention humane to that individual animal?” and “does it cause other effects?” An individual animal can suffer but removing that animal from its population may have knockoff effects on other animals. For example, if you’re taking a mom and leaving orphaned babies who are going to die from starvation and dehydration, that isn’t necessarily a scientifically humane intervention although it may be legal. 

In society, our general culture is to be humane to animals, kind and good to animals. That involves the physical treatment, as well as the ethical treatment of animals, which often brings in the why and how ought we care for animals. So, people can get really upset when something awful happens and because of the legal definition you can’t call it animal cruelty, but they feel that it is animal cruelty. That’s where that terminology can become gray in certain areas. So it’s quite important to understand that there are different ways of looking at what is humane. 

Whether it’s ethical or not, or societally accepted as humane, will be determined by people’s value systems which bring different ethical lenses to these big questions. And again, ethics is how we ought to as a society intervene in these types of measures. So, ethical wildlife control looks at not only, “can we do it and ensure the animal’s not suffering and avoid knockoff effects of additional suffering,” but also “should we be doing it in the first place,” which is really the question that we should be starting with.

Wildlife management has a long, complex history and poses numerous ethical dilemmas. What is the role of ethical discourse in decision-making with regard to killing one species to save another? 

Ethical discourse in the teachings of conservation and wildlife management did not happen widely until recently. I remember taking undergrad courses in conservation and no one questioned what interventions were happening because it was all for “good.” Conservation is ensuring that we have populations that are sustained and species don’t go extinct, so of course, it is inherently good. That’s what you’re taught. But we weren’t taught about different ethical lenses and that, in fact, conservation uses wildlife control techniques that are not ethical to many people’s value systems. And we’re just starting to have those conversations and really get deep into them.

“Science can help predict, model, and measure outcomes related to conservation measures, but it cannot dictate policy, and most important, science does not give permission to harm animals.”

Sara Dubois, 2020

This is an example of having that conversation around wolves, and also around other ways in which we use animals. More and more people are questioning, for example, whether certain animals should be kept in captivity or used in tourism, and so on. There are many ethical questions that we’re finally starting to ask, but it’s really been only in the last decade or so that it’s really becoming part of the teachings of wildlife management. The next generation of wildlife managers are going to have a lot more conversations around, “is it appropriate to do this, not just because the science says we can, but should we?” I hope that’s where we’re going to see some significant changes over how to influence wildlife management and conservation in the next few years.

What are the International Consensus Principles for Ethical Wildlife Control? 

The principles were designed by a global group of not just academics and theorists, but also practitioners, people working in the field. There were wildlife control participants including government representatives in the room. There were animal welfare scientists in the room. And tough conversations were had to get to a point where we came to an objective framework that we can all apply because we have these really different situations to discuss, from elephants, badgers, and baboons to wolves, possums, and snakes, everything on the conflict spectrum.

Our governments are looking at control programs and how can we approach these with an ethical lens that is consistent and not necessarily just one person’s views, because guess what? That person may change jobs and all of a sudden the whole entire program changes. So, we need to have a consistent framework. The goal was a very easy, stepwise procedure to walk through and be able to make really tough decisions when it comes to wildlife control situations.

How would the principles be applied to wolf management in BC, specifically the controversial wolf kill program for caribou recovery?

It’s important to note that this is a wildlife control program being done under the hat of wildlife management with the overarching goal of the conservation of an endangered species. There have been people who’ve been studying these caribou for their entire careers. You have 40+ years of evidence that with resource extraction these populations were going to be at risk because of the very niche habitat that they need. 

When we look at wolves in BC, particularly those that are impacting caribou populations, we unfortunately missed the window to apply the first step in the ethical principles, which is to look at human behaviour. Specifically, can the problem be mitigated by changing human behaviour? And of course, it was human behaviour that led to habitat loss for these caribou. 

I remember, nearly three decades ago, working with caribou biologists for Parks Canada and they were sending out flares years and years ago. I’ve met many other caribou biologists throughout the years who said they also prepared many reports to say this is going to happen if we don’t do something now about caribou populations and their habitat.

That’s the problem, we often don’t want to talk about why we are doing these types of activities that are making caribou at risk in the first place. Those are the tougher questions around economics and government policy that often are secondary to the conversation. “We have abundant wolf populations; it’s not a conservation issue” is often what you hear when they’re using justification to remove populations of animals. That is the problem when they’re using the guise of conservation within a wildlife management strategy.

Now, are we in a place where we can change that behaviour still? Can we go backwards and restore habitat? Can we stop some of the practices that led to the degradation and loss of caribou habitat? That’s the first step, but unfortunately it’s very hard now unless you make a very abrupt decision in multiple different policies across multiple different government interests to do that. And that’s where they’ve constantly hit the wall. They haven’t addressed this and yet said this is the long term change needed to preserve caribou species. 

Instead, they’ve taken the approach of “the easier, faster route is just to remove predator species of caribou” and it didn’t follow many of these principles. Are the harms serious enough to warrant wildlife control? Well, guess what? Wolves eat caribou. That’s not a harm, necessarily. Is it detrimental to the caribou population if wolves eat all of the caribou? Absolutely. Nobody wants that. But the harm in and of itself is not necessarily something we need to prevent. So that’s the challenge: the long-term preservation of caribou populations. But whether killing wolves is the only solution, that already fails the first two steps in this framework.

Is the desired outcome clear and achievable, and will it be monitored? One of the concerns here, as many have expressed, is that it’s being reevaluated every five years and reports are slow to come out. The information is not transparent about what’s happening. And that has been a serious concern. So, again, it doesn’t necessarily meet that criteria of having clear and achievable goals that we all understand and that are transparent and being regularly addressed.

Does the method itself carry the least animal welfare cost to the fewest animals? Unfortunately, the number of animals that have been impacted, the wolf population that is being removed, is significant. Since the program was implemented in 2015, 2,192 wolves have been killed. Will entire regional populations be extirpated? That’s a very serious question to be asking of biologists who are on the ground and what that means for entire ecosystems and all of the other parts, because you can’t just remove one part and think it’s going to continue to be okay. Removing wolves has had significant cascading impacts and those questions aren’t being addressed either. 

“When it comes to killing animals in the name of conservation, even if methods can cause an instantaneous death without pain or suffering, the consequences of removing that individual as a member role of its social structure, its genetic contribution, or its trophic role in the ecosystem can lead to harms to other animals and ecosystems.”

Sara Dubois, 2020

Is it possible to kill a wolf humanely? Yes. Is that being done now? That’s what’s being questioned by many different groups, because the evidence is not necessarily there, and we’re starting to get these pictures and images coming out now where we’re seeing body shots to animals. The humane method that has been established was headshots that render the animal completely senseless. So, we don’t quite know how those animals are dying, how long it’s taking them to die, and what kind of stress and panic they’re experiencing as helicopters are chasing them down. Also, what are the impacts on wolf pups that are now abandoned and on the pack itself when other members are being removed? It has many different impacts. So, for the question on welfare, we can’t say that it ticks that box either.

Have community values been considered? Every poll I’ve seen shows that the majority of British Columbians don’t want to kill wolves to save caribou. This is a larger habitat issue that everyone wants to be addressed. Healthy populations of caribou and wolves is the ultimate goal. But again, a wildlife management lens has been used and it is not necessarily fully considering community values because there is a lot of outrage as a result of this killing program. 

Moving forward, how do we do better?

What I would love to see one day is an entire academic journal dedicated to mistakes we’ve made with wildlife. Mistakes happen: in work, in school, in training, and in between. Whether it was the choice of a release location, poor placement of a trap or more minor errors, such as forgetting to change batteries in a camera trap or missing a program step, there is so much we can learn from one another. 

We all just want to share what worked rather than what didn’t work, and that’s the culture of scientific publications. But we’re all human and fallible. We make mistakes and we need to be able to share where we were met with challenges and how we addressed them. I’m sure there have been many mistakes made in wolf captures, in wolf killing, and in management of these animals. But often we don’t share those lessons until we’re one on one, talking to someone at a conference and “oh, you did that. So did we, and it didn’t work. Here’s why.” So, we don’t share them in a venue that is actually going to be useful.

A fundamental tenet of conservation programs is “adaptive management.” You’re adjusting policies and practices on the fly because something didn’t work, so why not just call it what it is and be transparent in saying “okay, here’s what we learned and here’s what we had to change to improve certain goals.”

“There is an urgent need to learn from mistakes so that others do not follow the same path and cause pointless and unnecessary pain, suffering, or death.”

Sara Dubois, 2020

In the case of killing wolves to save caribou, why are we still talking about this culling program in British Columbia? Why hasn’t it stopped despite public opposition, despite lack of justification for it, lack of actual realistic goals being met, of saving certain caribou populations? Even if predator control and maternal penning of caribou are considered somewhat effective in benefitting recovery of endangered caribou, it is still not sustainable. What is the long-term plan for this? How long can we keep killing wolves, is really the question all of us are asking. We thought it was going to be five years and now it’s 10. Is it going to be 15? Is it going to be 20? Is this a never-ending system? Because that’s beyond the ethical question of appropriate. Are we going to completely remove wolves from the landscape because we made initial mistakes with not protecting habitat in the first place when experts said we should have?

The label that wolves have is probably part of the issue. We saw that with the grizzly bear trophy hunt. There were scientists on one side saying harvest rates are fine, we can hunt them, and scientists on the other side saying we don’t even know what the population is, how can we possibly harvest them? There was competing science, but it took over 20 years for the government to acknowledge that this was actually a societal values issue: we don’t want to hunt grizzly bears anymore because that’s not who we are. 

But we haven’t evolved that conversation with wolves. And I think it’s because of the myths around wolves, because of agricultural interests as well. Because there’s still a lot of conflict on farms with farmed animals.

I was told once that ending the wolf kill program was not a winnable campaign. And I find that really interesting because I don’t understand why, why it is different from any of the others? Animals are being killed in ways that are not deemed societally humane, and without a final destination. And yet wolves are such an iconic species that we associate with coastal British Columbia as well as interior BC. These are different wolf populations, but why are we okay with one population being this icon for coastal BC and yet the interior population is being removed?

It’s quite interesting to hear that, because of the values and labels that are associated with wolves and the interests that are invested in wolves, this is a different issue than the grizzly bear trophy hunt. I thought that was a really interesting take, that this “bad wolf” label is why people are saying that this is not going to end. They will continue to have justification because they can continue to call wolves bad. That’s really where a lot of the conversations need to go, is to the value of wolves in our ecosystems, and why we aren’t protecting them in their backyards.

If we can change the reputation of the wolf, I think that would help a lot in getting people to understand how important they are in our world. If these decisions can’t pass an ethical review that includes an independent panel of bioethicists, animal welfare scientists, and biologists, they need to be reexamined. And the government needs to be transparent. It shouldn’t be difficult to get photos and videos of these animals being killed. If they have something to hide, then that tells you something right away. The public are paying for it, they have the right to see it and decide whether it is appropriate or not. 

There’s a lot of different viewpoints, but there is a way to work through these tough decisions. However, often those steps are skipped because it just takes too much time and effort. It means collaboration and having difficult conversations and we aren’t all going to be happy necessarily with the outcome. But that’s the purpose of getting to a long-term plan for these animals and their ecosystems. That’s the only way to get there. So, it is just whether or not there’s the societal and political willingness to take that on. The real challenge is getting elected officials and decision-makers to better understand what’s really at stake.

About Dr. Sara Dubois

Sara is an animal welfare scientist and wildlife biologist who has been working to improve the lives of wild animals for over 20 years. She has worked on diverse wildlife projects with Parks Canada, the BC Ministry of Environment, Wild Birds Trust, and the Wildlife Rehabilitators Network of BC, before joining the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BC SPCA) where she is currently the Chief Scientific Officer. Sara managed BC’s largest all-species wildlife rehabilitation centre before moving onto provincial wildlife and exotic animal operations and policy. As CSO for the past decade, she leads five teams of science and policy experts as a national leader in evidence-based programming for the animal welfare sector. As an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Sara teaches an applied animal biology course year-round to involve students in hands-on practicums working with all animal types.

References

Dubois, S. (2019). Killing for conservation: ethical considerations for controlling wild animals. In The Routledge handbook of animal ethics (pp. 407-419). Routledge. (PDF)

Dubois, S., Fenwick, N., Ryan, E. A., Baker, L., Baker, S. E., Beausoleil, N. J., Carter, S., Cartwright, B., Costa, F., Draper, C., Griffin, J., Grogan, A., Howald, G., Jones, B., Littin, K.E., Lombard, A.T., Mellor, D.J., Ramp, D., Schuppli, C.A., & Fraser, D. (2017). International consensus principles for ethical wildlife control. Conservation Biology, 31(4), 753-760. (PDF)

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