Last May, a jaw-dropping act of cruelty took place in Maine’s Muscongus Bay, a popular tourist area. Three coyotes were killed and strung from a buoy, their gruesome and pointless deaths treated as a simple Coast Guard maintenance issue. Nobody broke any laws (it is perfectly legal to shoot a coyote and leave her to rot), so nobody was held accountable. The same year, the Animal Legal Defense Fund ranked Maine third best in the country in animal protection laws.
As advocates celebrate rising public awareness of animal suffering, wild animals—non-domesticated animals that live in nature and depend on themselves to survive—are rarely part of the conversation. But they should not be ignored: our ideology and laws dictate the terms of their existence, and the interests that oversee their homes cause immense suffering. Even though most of our lives do not intersect with those of wild animals, we have a moral and practical interest in letting them live out their lives without interference.
A large part of animal advocacy centers around animals raised for human consumption. This focus persists as the U.S. continues to implement practices considered barbaric elsewhere, like in Europe, where hens are allotted more space, cattle cannot be kept inside year-round, and other animal welfare laws provide somewhat greater protections. Pets like dogs and cats also receive a good deal of public attention, often depending upon political convenience—like the time then-Governor Kristi Noem bragged about shooting her own puppy, or when Dr. Anthony Fauci was linked to Tunisian science labs that allegedly experiment on beagles. Wild animals that end up in zoos or sanctuaries occasionally capture public interest for brief periods, but the interest is often fleeting. (Even Moo Deng, the baby hippopotamus who skyrocketed to internet fame, is unlikely to keep drawing crowds once she reaches full size.) In my personal political experience with “animal lovers,” however, ranging from vegans (who at roughly one percent of the American population, are generally considered hard-core activists) to pet-lovers (often the more accessible type), I rarely encounter another advocate who thinks much about wild animals.
This is indefensible. Wild animals deserve our attention and respect, for the same reasons that we should care about any creature: they are sentient, with recognizable social behaviors and emotions, and just like humans their lives have intrinsic value. But wild animals are also unique, simply by virtue of existing outside of the sphere of human stewardship. They live their lives mostly out of our sight, and we have no hands-on role in their breeding or care. Still, our current system of land management treats wild animals as simply another variable in our nation’s supply-and-demand graph, to be kept at optimal levels for our purposes. The truth is, we don’t have that right, and time and time again, our attempts at interference have only caused more damage. A different path forward is not only possible, but in light of the damage we have caused to the biosphere on our current path, absolutely necessary.
Despite their independence, or maybe because of it, we project an important cultural role onto wild animals. They loom large in our history and storytelling, and provide reference points in human interpretations of who we are. In this sense, these creatures may be more important to us than we are to them. When it comes to domesticated species, scientists often speculate if dogs would struggle to survive in a world without humans, while ethicists debate whether it’s really wrong to kill a cow if we’re the reason they’re bred in the first place. As fraught as these debates may be, it is much harder to imagine any way modern industrial society has benefited wild creatures.
Yet the assumption that wild animals somehow benefit from human oversight underpins the way most wild lands are managed in the United States. At two billion-plus acres, our country is quite large, and just three percent of that land is considered “urban”—a statistic that might lead you to imagine vast swaths of untouched wilderness spanning between the coasts. In reality, most of the remaining acreage is made up of cropland and grassland pastures, followed by privately-owned forests, all of which humans preside over, and little of which provides uninterrupted habitat for wild animals. Only 13 percent of the entire country’s landmass is formally protected in any manner. But protected doesn’t mean untouched: hunting is permitted in 436 of the 573 total of National Wildlife Refuges. Instead of protection as such, the prevailing model of conservation presumes that our intervention is necessary for the wellbeing of wild animals, which for some reason simply cannot manage on their own.
The importance of human intervention and oversight is articulated as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM), which assumes that hunters—those who derive personal benefit from killing the animals living in wild lands—are best suited to making decisions about how those wild lands are maintained. The model promotes seven basic principles, all of which assume that wildlife is only useful as a resource and ignore the possibility that wild lives might have any interests of their own. For example: wildlife is allocated according to democratic rule of law; meaning it’s a commodity that should be allocated among humans, with no consideration for what or who is being allocated. Every person has an equal opportunity under the law to participate in hunting and fishing; because killing animals is our American right. And scientific management is the best means for wildlife management; so long as that scientific management is devoted to maintaining optimal population levels of species desirable to hunters, fishers, and trappers.
The NAM has been embraced by most state and federal agencies charged with the responsibility of protecting wildlife, meaning that those who are interested in killing certain animals for economic benefit or recreation are paradoxically granted the responsibility for their well-being.
The idea of hunters as the original and most essential conservationists appears endlessly as a way of justifying our approach to managing public lands, and should be thought of as the central piece of propaganda that holds up American wildlife management. Federal, state and nonprofit groups confidently repeat Theodore Roosevelt’s assertion that wild animals can only exist when “sportsmen” preserve them. “In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen,” reads the official U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website, quoting Roosevelt. Of course, this pointed use of the word “civilized” is stained with the blood of millions of murdered Native Americans—who for centuries on the same land followed a more reciprocal and coexistent relationship with the natural world, and who tended to see themselves explicitly as caretakers of the land for future generations. Still, Roosevelt’s backwards logic, enshrined in the NAM, guides wildlife management in the United States to this day. Its goal is to ensure that there is a harvestable surplus of “game” species—that is, the animals that are desirable to hunters, such as white-tailed deer.
The NAM is a natural extension of our concept of land ownership. Capitalist land markets make it very difficult for land to not be put to some sort of economic use, like natural resource extraction, agriculture, or housing. Our broader understanding of protected wild areas is filtered through this worldview, which attempts to identify “ecosystem services” provided by the land such as timber or carbon sequestration, and their corresponding dollar values. The value of animals that are hunted for sport fits neatly into this framework, realized through hunting licenses and other recreational spending.
Following this line of reasoning, concepts like maintaining a sustainable population of particular types of animals might be deemed important—so long as doing so encourages people to spend money. Wild land is only allowed to exist if it can be shown to pay for itself, even if the creatures who depend on it do not follow the same economic logic. If the economic benefit is deemed insufficient, then human interests may decide it’s time to put the land to a more profitable use.
People have used this perverse logic to argue that trophy hunting actually helps animals, because it incentivizes humans to leave wild land undeveloped. Why else, this argument implies, should we leave a lion’s habitat alone, if not for the purpose of entering it and killing him? What value could a giraffe possibly have, if not as a gruesome wall plaque? (This argument certainly would not convince the animals being hunted, who probably value their own lives far more than the obscure notion of a population target.)
The NAM asserts that the main function of wild lands is the harvesting of wild animals from them. It centers the role of hunters, fishers, and trappers in governing our relationship to nature, under the assumption that they know best how to steward the natural world in an economically productive way. The evidence for this assumption is extremely narrow: hunters do deserve some credit for preserving and producing surplus populations of the animals they like to hunt, but show little regard for any others.
The laws put into place by hunters and their allies govern most human relations to wild animals. Control and domination permeate this relationship, reflecting the roots of conservation in white supremacy and the prejudicial arrogance that prioritizes one group over others. Supported by pseudoscientific reasoning that does not account for any costs to non-human animals, and backed by mainstream nonprofits with near-universal buy-in, hunters and their allies have designed a system that delivers countless variations of mass slaughter. In all instances, human arrogance and ignorance toward other species is on full display, with those species paying the price. Despite being increasingly out of step with the wider view of a public that is less supportive of hunting, feels more positively toward large carnivores like wolves and coyotes, and is more likely to interact with wildlife through watching than hunting, this system mostly stays out of the public eye, and garners very little attention or criticism.
Where I live in Maine, coyotes seem the biggest victims of this worldview. Maine taxpayers have spent over $50,000 annually to kill coyotes since 2011, and they are the only animal explicitly excluded from the state’s wanton waste law (this means that unlike the other animals that can be legally hunted, it is legal to shoot a coyote and leave her to rot). Their year-round hunting remains unchallenged under the auspices of maintaining a sustainable deer population (for hunters to kill), as well as protecting domesticated animals used in animal agriculture (for humans to eat, and which coyotes rarely kill). In defiance of evidence that coyote hunting is worsening the problems of predation, state wildlife officials even advocate for trapping coyotes where guns are not allowed. But research shows that by shattering pack structures, the population of coyotes actually increases, as do attacks on livestock.
Polarizing battles over wildlife management are also playing out in Colorado. Most recently, a 2023 ballot measure to ban the hunting and trapping of mountain lions lost by about 300,000 votes, or 10 percent of votes cast. Mountain lion hunting typically involves using hunting dogs to chase the cats up a tree or against a rockface, where they are shot at close range. Advocates for the organized killing of these animals celebrated the result as a win for science-based wildlife management, despite the broken social structure again leading to more livestock predation and more human-wildlife conflicts.
Colorado’s bungled gray wolf introduction may have contributed to the failure to ban mountain lion hunting. The proposition to relocate wolves from Oregon to Colorado narrowly passed in 2020, and was justified by the fact that they used to live there. Many worried that the reintroduction might be bad for animals raised for food, or for companion animals, and few efforts were made to prepare the public for the interactions that would result from wolf reintroduction. Since then, wolf after wolf has been trapped, relocated, and killed, and many have recognized the forced relocation to have been a death sentence for the pack.
The Colorado project was inspired by what was widely considered a successful wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone, which ran from 1995 to 1996. Author and park ranger Rick Mcintyre’s masterful documentation in his series on The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone follows the repopulation of the park. The project likely required inflicting considerable suffering onto the wolves themselves, who were suddenly forced to survive in a new ecosystem with artificial boundaries, outside of which they could be targeted by eager hunters. Nearly a century after their extermination by U.S. wildlife management authorities in 1926, Yellowstone is now considered one of the best places in the world to view wolves. Yet the ethics of forcibly removing wolf packs from their indigenous homes, and their subsequent relocation to an unfamiliar ecology, was not and is not broadly discussed within the conservation community. Certainly, no efforts were made at the time to assess whether doing so was a desire of the wolves—who, of course, could not be asked whether they wished to be moved from Canada to Wyoming—or indeed in the better interests of other animals that had come to fill their ecological niche after their decades-long absence.
The potential for unnecessary suffering aside, the wolf reintroduction has long been given credit for saving Yellowstone from the scourge of the elk population that exploded after U.S. authorities eradicated wolves the first time around. Contemporary evidence challenges this conclusion, which should raise questions about whether inflicting plausible suffering on wolves in the name of scientific wildlife management is necessary or useful.
The government is not done with organized killing of wild animals. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to launch a new, decades-long “removal” of barred owls. The barred owl’s presence in North America predates that of humans, and they are considered native to North America. However, they tend to do better than other kinds of owls in lands that have been impacted by human activity (thinning old growth forests and increased wildfires have decimated the preferred habitat for the spotted owl, which this plan purports to save). The effort is budgeted to cost around a quarter of a billion dollars, and is unlikely to make any meaningful difference in the overall population of the barred owl, despite leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of individual birds, through no fault of their own: the bird’s population growth is already outpacing the “best case scenario” of the slaughter. (Notably, this plan is now in doubt due to Trump administration budget cuts).
Such descriptions could go on endlessly. Conservation and wildlife management is a waste of time and money for most of the human population, and a parade of horrors for the wild animals living under our control. We tend to describe these animals in terms of species and populations, but scientific investigation has made clear to us that they are individuals with families and communities who experience life through a range of recognizable emotions. Instead of respecting these lives—or even just ignoring them—we marginalize, torture, and exterminate them.
The prevailing model of conservation has failed all but a few. In alignment with our broader economic and political system, its disregard for nonhuman lives, for less privileged human populations, and for future generations has brought about a mass extinction event that threatens all life on Earth. But there is an alternative: outside of mainstream conservation and wildlife management, emerging paradigms challenge mainstream conservation and try to correct for its failures. Alternatives tend to arise from a simple intuition that is absent from mainstream conservation: that wild animals are not populations to be managed for our benefit, but are individuals who value their own lives.These individuals have more of a claim to life and to freedom from harm than humans have claim to kill them.
“Just preservation” stands out as the framework most aligned with the egalitarian worldview cultivated by left politics. This model emphasizes respect and dignity for other species and attention to the interrelationships between them, rather than the modes through which humans might profit from them. Just preservation advocates for ethical impartiality between species, such that we do not treat species on the basis of any positive preference or negative prejudice. It proposes a multispecies society with equitable distribution of resources and an acknowledgement of responsibilities to other species, as well as explicit consideration for the future of all species.
The principles of just preservation are compatible with socialist thought, and have been strengthened by scientific investigation, moral and philosophical inquiry, and a rational analysis of the failures of traditional conservation. In practice, just preservation would involve explicitly weighing the interests of current human, future human, and non-anthropocentric interests against one another when considering how to “use” nature. People representing these interests would make their case in front of a public trustee (plausibly a reformed version of our currently existing, hunter-dominated state wildlife and natural resource committees), and the trustee would make allocations based upon those resources.
Just preservation offers an ethical framework for reinventing our relationship to wild animals, but the traditional approach to conservation remains mostly unchallenged in policy spheres. Even without taking the well-being of wild animals into account, this status quo represents a failure of representative governance. Most of us who engage with wildlife do so through nonviolent methods like hiking, bird watching, or sight seeing (activities with about twice as many participants in 2016 and 2022 compared to hunters, fishers, and trappers). Because they see wild lands as their personal hunting grounds, hunters and their allies claim to have a monopoly on decision-making—even as more and more of us would like to see wild lands and wild lives treated better.
This improvement in popular attitudes is cause for optimism, but without democratic control of institutions it is not sufficient for change—or else healthcare, military actions, taxation, gun laws, and many other areas of governance would function much differently. Even as the public becomes more sympathetic toward nonhuman animals, this sympathy often appears less as a social movement and more like a constellation of isolated individuals and nonprofits: all acting in often admirable but disconnected ways, without pursuing any coherent agenda.
The absence of a meaningful social movement to reform conservation is what motivated the founding of Wildlife for All, a national campaign which aims to drive state-level reforms in wildlife management. The group’s communications director, Mandy Culbertson, believes that many violent and undemocratic aspects of conservation persist because people just don’t know about them: “There is a general belief that society has moved past it—they don’t know about the specifics of it, they think that things like trapping happened on the frontier in the 1800s. They don’t know that there are powerful, entrenched interests that keep it active,” she says.
These interests, and the functionaries that represent them, are not generally partisan—following the North American Model is more or less a qualification for working in the field—but the topic has become deeply polarizing. State wildlife commissioners showing any resistance to the most extreme demands of hunters become the target of harassment and lawsuits, as seen recently in Washington and Colorado, where state wildlife officials have recently been driven to resign after opposing hunting interests in their respective states.
Wildlife for All emphasizes that states are the most practical way to take on traditional interests in conservation and wildlife management because of the large amount of wild land owned directly by states, and because their jurisdiction over much federally-owned land. States are also easier to affect change within, and a few engaged advocates have a much greater capacity to influence policy than they might on the federal stage. More transparency in state governance will expose and undermine the entrenched interests that cause the most harm to wild lives, and public engagement on these issues will facilitate the expression of a public will with less violent tendencies toward the natural world. Their democratic approach to wildlife management is accompanied by a respect for the individual interests and intrinsic value of all organisms and the belief that our values should be explicit.
It is easy for advocates to feel hopeless, since the public will rarely matches policy reality in this country, and because animals are far from top of mind for most people. Many animal advocates focus on good, concrete, personal things—like not buying or eating products made from dead animals or helping to rescue living ones. But collective action is still an option. Actions as simple as providing comments during legislative sessions on matters of wild animal well-being can be effective, and can help counterbalance the traditional hunting interests that always have their voices heard. We can also nominate people for wildlife commissions that come from different backgrounds, rather than the upper class white men that tend to populate these bodies. Instead of operating on the margins of advocacy, Wildlife for All offers a pathway through which animal lovers can engage and stand a real chance of winning on important issues.
Our model of conservation is another manifestation of our exploitative economic system. Like our economic system it has failed all but those who wish to take advantage of what it claims to preserve. The interests that sustain it do not represent the public will, and it is time for new, morally defensible principles to govern our relationship with the natural world. For the sake of the wild animals that live there and for our own good, public wild lands should be controlled democratically, rather than by hunters and their allies. By stewarding our public lands in the interests of all living upon them and of future generations of humans and non-humans, wild animals will be able to finally live in peace.