Our conservation ethics

Human influences, inadvertent and intended, continue to threaten the survival of wildlife populations. Although rarely considered, habitat destruction, trophy hunting, and over-exploitation of food resources also cause suffering of individuals through displacement, stress, starvation, and reduced security. Yet, the notion that animal welfare applies to wildlife has escaped most welfarists and conservationists. Consequently, there is a need for an ethical framework for wildlife conservation that explicitly considers animal welfare.

Emerging from Raincoast’s early wolf research (2000-2014), and now embedded across all of our programs, is the recognition that the integrity of animal habitats and their populations are closely linked to the welfare of the individual animals. We know that many individuals within disturbed wildlife populations endure suffering. Habitat destruction, for example, can deprive species of the resources they need to survive, leading to stress, injury, starvation, and death. Although less obvious than direct human actions, these impacts raise many of the same animal welfare concerns as unregulated industrial farming: in both cases, the suffering of animals is justified by the perceived benefits to humans.

Historically, concerns of animal welfare have only applied to animals under human care, such as farm, companion, or research animals. In our view, the extension to wild animals is conspicuously missing. At Raincoast, we work from the premise that the seemingly disparate world views of conservationists and animal welfarists are closely related.

Practicing non-invasive research

This is why we aim to apply methods that are minimally invasive to wildlife. Accordingly, much of our research hinges on obtaining information from remote cameras, drones (under SARA permit), passive acoustic recorders, and genetic samples such as hair and scats, which we collect without capturing or handling wildlife. In part, this ethic has motivated us to examine the ecology of wolf parasites and diseases, some of which cause agony among infected individuals. Indeed, it also motivated us to succeed at one of the most quixotic conservation ambitions of this century – we now control the commercial hunting rights in six tenures, an action that has extinguished commercial trophy hunting of large carnivores in nearly 57,000 km² of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Wildlife welfare

At Raincoast, we actively encourage a wildlife welfare ethic among our staff and other conservationists. We believe that the suffering wildlife endure because of humans is our collective responsibility and presents a moral imperative for conservationists and welfarists to carefully consider and act upon. Thus, our approach to conservation and management is grounded in doing the most good and the least harm to people, animals, and the environment.

“Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethic. We need a boundless ethic which will include the animals also… The time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.” – Albert Schweitzer, 1924

Raincoast’s philosophical foundation

Do no harm
Because we can doesn’t mean we should
Individuals are important
Diversity of organisms is good
Ecological complexity is good
Evolution is good
Biotic diversity has intrinsic and aesthetic value

Raincoast’s position on hunting

Raincoast supports hunting for sustenance and for Indigenous cultural and ceremonial purposes. We do not, however, support trophy hunting of any species, by anyone.

We also oppose the use of carnivore hunting as a wildlife management tool intended to reduce human-wildlife conflict or influence the populations of other species. Without addressing habitat degradation and measuring long-term outcomes, lethal control is often a temporary solution that can carry unintended ecological consequences.

Publications

Anon. 2010. Conservation and animal welfare: consensus statement and guiding principles: Conservation and Animal Welfare Science Workshop. Animal Welfare. 19(2):191-192. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0962728600001445

Brook, RK, Cattet, M, Darimont, CT, Paquet, PC, Proulx, G. 2015. Maintaining ethical standards during conservation crises. Canadian Wildlife Biology and Management. Issue 4, pages 72-79. https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/ethcbio/3/

Caravaggi, A, Amado, TF, Brook, RK, Ciuti, S., Darimont, CT, Drouilly, M, English, HM, Field, KA, Iossa, G, Martin, JE, McElligott, AG, Mohammadi, A, Nayeri, D, O’Neill, HMK, Paquet, PC, Périquet, S, Proulx, G, Rabaiotti, D, Recio, MR, Soulsbury, CD, Tadich, T, Wynn-Grant, R. 2021. On the need for rigorous welfare and methodological reporting for the live capture of large carnivores: A response to de Araujo et al. (2021). Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 12, 1793– 1799. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13664.

Paquet, PC, Darimont, CT. 2010. Wildlife conservation and animal welfare: two sides of the same coin? Animal Welfare, 19(2): 177-190. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0962728600001433.

Paquet, P.C. and Alexander, S.M. 2018. Habitat loss: changing how animals think? Pages 4-14 In Andrew Butterworth, editor. Animal welfare in a changing world. 2018. CABI Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK; Boston, MA. LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059470

Proulx, G, Paquet, PC. 2026. Strychnine – An Ecological Liability in Western Canada. Canadian Wildlife Biology & Management. https://cwbm.ca/strychnine-an-ecological-liability-in-western-canada/

Proulx, G, Paquet, P. 2026. Alberta’s ill-advised black bear hunting. Science, 393(6817), 1193-1193. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ael2468

Proulx, G, Brook, RK, Cattet, M, Darimont, C, Paquet, PC. 2016. Poisoning wolves with strychnine is unacceptable in experimental studies and conservation programmes. Environmental Conservation, 43(1), 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892915000211

Photography ethics