While we think there is great potential, behavior-based interventions also open up new ethical questions, or raise old questions in new ways.

Some concern animal welfare. While avoiding poisoning or shooting animals can reduce overall harm, behavioral management may generate other forms of harm. For example, using aversive stimuli such as loud noises, harassment or mild pain to train species to avoid an area may cause distress and even trauma. In other cases, there are incidental harms to other species, such as animals killed to be used as “bait” in behavioral interventions.

Changing an animal’s behavior may impact local communities’ livelihoods and cultural practices, too, whether for good or ill – like ranchers and farmers asked to use scent “biofences” to keep predators away from their livestock.

What’s more, some people believe deliberately modifying animal behaviors is unacceptable. To take one iconic example, as California condors neared extinction in the wild, some conservationists pushed for intensive interventions and captive breeding. Others were so strongly opposed that they viewed extinction as preferable, arguing that the condor was “better dead than bred.”

Another potentially significant issue is what we have named “behavioral bycatch”: all the costs for organisms unintentionally caught up in a behavior-based management project. For example, some fish farms have tried to prevent seals from eating their fish by using a device that plays an unpleasant sound: a seal’s version of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” But in one study, scientists discovered that toothed whales were even more sensitive to the sound and less likely to adjust to it. As a result, these “non-target” animals may be more prone to abandoning the area than the target animals.

We argue that in order to make wise decisions, wildlife managers need to identify the diverse values at stake in a given situation. This might involve cultural and heritage values – such as the significance of hunting in an Indigenous culture – as well as economic and aesthetic values. It will also likely include the welfare of individual animals, the health of ecosystems and perhaps animals’ ability to live with minimal interference.

Together, we developed a framework to help identify and discuss these sometimes conflicting values in any given situation. The value of boosting one endangered species’ breeding success, for example, might need to be considered against the suffering of other individual animals caught up in the intervention process.

We then created a series of steps to support conservation workers as they compare and contrast the ethical dimensions of possible behavior-based management approaches and decide on the best course of action. It is key for managers to be clear about what a proposed intervention is trying to achieve and how likely it is to meet that goal. Next is weighing the potential effects on a broader range of species, including people: For example, might it enable a sustainable agricultural harvest?

These resources are not intended to provide definitive answers. However, they allow researchers to focus on some of the key potential impacts, then compare these to other methods that might be attempted. Today, virtually all conservation challenges have a human dimension, and it’s important to recognize that the most effective solutions may involve changing people’s behavior, not animals’ – like controlling human food waste to discourage “problem bears.”

Ultimately, we see great value in conservation behavioral interventions, but also some challenges. We hope slowing down to consider the values at stake in conservation behavior interventions will help minimize harm and maximize benefits – to both humans and wildlife.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts, from an independent nonprofit. Try our free newsletters.

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Daniel T. Blumstein receives funding from the National Science Foundation. He is chief editor of Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Catherine Price receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Thom van Dooren receives funding from the Australian Research Council.