Trade-offs between Animal Welfare and Conservation in Law and Policy

Reconciling the views of animal ethicists and scientific conservationists meets epistemological problems (Perry & Perry, 2008). Indeed, bridging the divide between animal ethics and animal welfare science can be a difficult enough task, even without the added complication of animal conservation (Fraser,1999). Once animals reach a minimum level of phylo-genetic sophistication that is assumed to give rise to a capacity to suffer, they can be attributed rights. Furthermore, their status can be measured with reference to their sentience, which in turn can require animals to be considered on an individual basis. By contrast, the conservation scientist often has a very ifferent perspective and only needs to focus attention on individual animals when deploying research methods that require counting or tagging individual animals, or where a population has been reduced to very small numbers. Consequently, when conservation scientists descend below habitats or ecosystem diversity, or rise above genetic diversity, their lowest common denominator is most likely to be at the species, subspecies or population levels. Given these different perspectives, this chapter first analyzes the relationship between animal welfare concerns and conservation strategies and, second, seeks to prescribe scope for trade-offs where the two perspectives are in conflict