Summary
The concept of rewilding aims to restore ecosystems and conserve species by reintroducing wildlife species that were once present or enhancing the populations of existing species. Rewilding strategies involve releasing wildlife species into their natural habitats, possibly through translocation from other areas, re-establishing feral populations, or selectively breeding domestic strains to get closer to their wild ancestors. Rewilding can boost sustainable ecotourism, benefiting both local communities and visitors. While this economic potential supports conservation, there are concerns about conflicts with activities like hunting, agriculture, and forestry.
Despite the positive goals of rewilding, it can also bring challenges, such as conflicts of interest between humans and wildlife, particularly in agriculture, forestry, and disease dynamics. It can also blur the line between domesticated and wildlife animals as during rewilding, putting humans in a position where they look out for the welfare of the wild animal. The welfare of wildlife can also be potentially compromised through transportation, being placed in unfamiliar habitats, predation, stress through human handling, and possible death from disease and hunting after release. A challenge with rewilding/reintroduction is that the objective and potential suffering experienced by wild animals needs to align with the overarching goal. Additionally, the methods used should always be the one with least suffering for the animal.
The authors propose 10 ethical areas to consider prior to planning and acting, such as the purpose of the study, how much frustration the study will cause the animals, and the consequences of rewilding. The authors hope the ideas and recommendations they present can serve as guidelines for wilderness restoration and provide insights for future research.
The recovery of many populations of large carnivores and herbivores in major parts of Europe and North America offers ecosystem services and opportunities for sustainable utilization of wildlife. Examples of services are hunting, meat, and skin, along with less invasive utilization such as ecotourism and wildlife spotting. An increasing number of studies also point out the ecosystem function, landscape engineering, and cascading effects of wildlife as values for human existence, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem resilience. Within this framework, the concept of rewilding has emerged as a means to add to the wilderness through either supplementary release of wildlife species already present or reintroduction of species formerly present in a certain area. The latter involves translocation of species from other geographical areas, releases from captivity, feralization, retro-breeding, or de-domestication of breeds for which the wild ancestor is extinct. While all these initiatives aim to reverse some of the negative human impacts on life on earth, some pose challenges such as conflicts of interest between humans and wildlife in, for example, forestry, agriculture, traffic, or disease dynamics (e.g., zoonosis). There are also welfare aspects when managing wildlife populations with the purpose to serve humans or act as tools in landscape engineering. These welfare aspects are particularly apparent when it comes to releases of animals handled by humans, either from captivity or translocated from other geographical areas. An ethical values clash is that translocation can involve suffering of the actual individual, while also contributing to reintroduction of species and reestablishment of ecological functions. This paper describes wildlife recovery in Europe and North America and elaborates on ethical considerations raised by the use of wildlife for different purposes, in order to find ways forward that are acceptable to both the animals and humans involved. The reintroduction ethics aspects raised are finally formulated in 10 guidelines suggested for management efforts aimed at translocating wildlife or reestablishing wilderness areas.