Is it ethical to change animals’ behaviour to protect them? Premium

Today, virtually all conservation challenges have a human dimension, and it’s important to recognise that the most effective solutions may involve changing people’s behaviour, not animals’ – like controlling human food waste to discourage dogs on the streets.

When large and warty cane toads were first brought to Australia nearly 100 years ago, they had a simple mission: to gobble up beetles and other pests in the sugarcane fields.

Today, though, the toads have become an infamous example of a global problem: biocontrol initiatives gone wrong. The squat creatures have spread across the top half of the country, wreaking havoc on ecosystems. Cane toads are highly toxic, and consuming just one is generally lethal for predators like monitor lizards, freshwater crocodiles, and the small, spotted marsupials called quolls.

But what if you taught other animals not to eat the toads? Could you – and should you?

Conservation behaviour scientists are doing just that. One of the most exciting areas in this quickly evolving field is behaviour-based management, in which an animal’s behaviour is encouraged, modified or manipulated in some way to achieve positive conservation outcomes.

In Australia, scientists are working with Indigenous rangers to teach predators not to eat cane toads. Next door in New Zealand – or Aotearoa, in the Indigenous Māori language – researchers, including one of us, Catherine Price, have used fake scents to condition ferrets, hedgehogs and other predators to ignore endangered birds’ eggs. Other behaviour-based management efforts include re-teaching lost migratory routes to birds in North America, preparing captive animals for life in the wild in Colombia and using deterrents like coloured flags to keep wildlife away from sites where they might conflict with humans.

This research has significant potential to conserve threatened species and reduce animal deaths. However, modifying behaviour may come at a cost to animals or the communities they live in.

We are scientists and philosophers who study conservation and the ethical dilemmas involved in modifying animal behaviour. Working with colleagues, we have developed a framework to help researchers evaluate the ethical considerations of conservation behaviour interventions against other options.