Compassionate conservation deserves a morally serious rather than dismissive response - Reply to Callen et al. 2020

Compassionate Conservation argues for a paradigm shift in how conservation biologists value and treat the natural world (Wallach et al., 2018). It argues, for example, in favour of according to certain nonhuman animals a significantly higher moral status or value than conservation biologists have traditionally recognized. Conservation has typically regarded the method of lethal culling (or otherwise seriously harming) animals as a justified conservation tool. Compassionate Conservation holds, amongst other things, that the deliberate killing of certain animals is not in general (or perhaps ever) a justified conservation tool – animals' significant moral status renders it morally illegitimate. Within conservation, this is a radical challenge. However, critics of Compassionate Conservation sometimes fail to give challenges such as this one the serious response they deserve.