After I bought this book, Animal Conservation Ethics and the Population Problem: A Habilitation on Rehabilitation, by Leif Broström DeVaney, at a conference of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, I told a few friends that I had done so because of the picture of a grey squirrel on the cover. While it is true that the picture did catch my eye first, it is equally true that I found the title even more intriguing. Conservation and rehabilitation do not usually appear in the same sentence, let alone in a book title. In the usual scheme of things, they are often diametrically opposed to each other: conservation focuses on species, populations, ecosystems, and does not object to killing individual animals if its goals require it; while rehabilitation focuses precisely on individual animals, and their needs. This tension is in fact Dr DeVaney’s starting point. The overarching theme of his book, as I understood it, is bringing the two extremes, conservation and rehabilitation, closer together, both theoretically and practically.

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The intellectual journey starts with the author, who holds a PhD in conservation biology, showing that the definition of his discipline is far from clear. There appear, in his reckoning, to be two possibilities: the first sees conservation biology as the application of biological knowledge to decision-making regarding the natural environment (biology applied to a human activity); the second one sees it as the study of an object.

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Each definition is, in the author’s opinion, somewhat inadequate. The first one, implying the use of biology to regulate human actions, does not do justice to the sophistication of the science. After all, it does not require specialist knowledge to understand that cutting down ancient woodland or dumping chemicals into a river is going to be bad for the environment.

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The second definition, which considers conservation biology as a branch of science with a particular object of study (in the way zoology is the study of animals and botany is the study of plants), runs into the unique problem of the object of study being somewhat vague. What exactly is the entity that conservation biology deals with? The obvious candidate for this is a SONE (super-organismic natural entity): a habitat, an ecosystem, a biotic community. The problem with seeing a SONE as the specific object of study, however, is that it is not, strictly speaking, a “thing” at all. Unlike animals or plants, it is not directly experienced by us, and it does not have clear spatial boundaries. If someone asked you to show them a SONE, such as an ecosystem, you could only point to individual organisms, and then explain (but not demonstrate) that they work together in harmony and need each other in order to thrive. Dr DeVaney therefore comes to a conclusion that a SONE, as well as the associated concept of population, is less of a concrete object of study that can be experienced, and more of a mental concept, explanatory aid, almost a metaphor for reality, rather than a given reality in itself.

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In his search for the essence of conservation biology Dr DeVaney ends up formulating an idea that is very close to the literal translation of the word biology: it is the study of life, and of how living organisms flourish. This involves an ontological shift (ontology being the philosophical enquiry into what truly exists), from the general, such as an ecosystem or population, to the particular, namely an individual organism. This change of focus immediately brings conservation closer to rehabilitation, and allows the author to introduce the concept of compassionate conservation.

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`The ethical implications of this shift in priorities, from the general to the particular, soon become apparent. The killing of individual animals for the sake of the ecosystem, accepted as normal in traditional conservation, appears in a completely different light in compassionate conservation, which explicitly commits itself to considering the flourishing of every organism, and especially of sentient beings, those whose lives matter to them. This brings the author to the particularly contentious question of biotic nativeness, since a lot of traditional killing-for-conservation is aimed at non-native species.

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As someone who rescues the much-maligned grey squirrels, non-native in the UK and mercilessly persecuted for this reason, I was especially encouraged to read Dr DeVaney’s robust critique of the nativeness paradigm, the largely unchallenged mantra of “native good, non-native bad”. The main reason he gives for calling into question this mantra is the arbitrary nature of determining who is native and who is not native — how long does it take for a species to be considered “naturalised”? There appear to be no strict scientific criteria for answering this question. Yet on such flimsy grounds countless animals lose their lives. In conservation, as it is generally practised now, the lives of non-native animals are not even factored into the process of decision-making in the “management” of the ecosystem. It is clear that, in Dr DeVaney’s view, compassionate conservation would follow a different paradigm.

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Continuing in the field of ethics, another feature of traditional, as opposed to compassionate, conservation, comes under criticism. The author uncovers what amounts to a logical fallacy: the view that nature has an ideal state, usually a past state, which should be maintained at all costs. If this idealised past state is disturbed, for example, by the arrival of new species, the traditional paradigm dictates that it should be restored exactly to what it was before. This stance, Dr DeVaney points out, is logically false. Nature develops and changes all the time. There is no reason why any given state should be freeze-framed and declared ideal. An ecological philosophy which can be summed up as “is-equals-ought”, or, more accurately, “was-equals-ought”, amounts to a variant of the naturalistic fallacy, a recognised faulty way of thinking.

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Thus rejecting both indiscriminate killing of non-native species and the compulsion to freeze nature in a given state, compassionate conservation actually starts to converge with wildlife rehabilitation, since both share the same values of preserving life and helping it to flourish. The last part of the book is dedicated to the practicalities of wildlife rescue and rehabilitation.

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Unfortunately, it was towards the end of the book that my intellectual euphoria (it is always good to see your own views in print) somewhat dissipated. The author’s chosen method for exploring the field of wildlife rehabilitation is participant observation, and he spent two years volunteering at a prominent centre to gather data for his research. I have to admit that the field notes included in the Appendix to the book make for rather disturbing reading. As someone who rescues squirrels, I was particularly attentive to what was said about their rearing and release, and it was, if I am honest with myself, close to appalling. The notes record multiple instances of baby squirrels aspirating milk during feeding — a very serious, often fatal, situation where milk gets into the lungs. The notes give no indication that volunteers received specific training in safe syringe-feeding techniques. Furthermore, the squirrels were released very young, by a process of hard release, and no provision was made for overwintering autumn juveniles. This is not a criticism of Dr DeVaney’s research, who, after all, only recorded what he observed, and on several occasions questioned the practice, at least in his notes. So, without wishing to shoot the messenger, I would simply conclude that even in institutions that are committed to promoting the flourishing of animal life, theory and practice can stray rather wide apart.

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And, at this point, I would shamelessly recommend our own book, Grey Squirrel Rescue: Care, Compassion, Coexistence. It contains a variety of field stories, ethical reflections, and practical guidance on grey squirrel rescue. Unlike Dr DeVeney’s academic volume, published by Palgrave Macmillan, our book is easily accessible for the general reader, and, curiously, covers much of the same territory, although in a different format.

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