An ethical approach to the human-animal interface for supporting biodiversity conservation and animal welfare

The current biodiversity loss due to anthropogenic impact raises the urgent need to conserve animal species by adopting innovative approaches that consider the needs of both humans and animals, in line with biodiversity conservation’s fundamental dimensions: human, animal, and habitat. These three dimensions are interconnected through increasingly frequent interactions that need to be considered along with the impact that conservation actions, practices, and choices have on stakeholders (all the parties, human and non-human, affected by these actions) within a specific context, from local to global scale. In particular, the human-animal interface resulting from interactions, and animal species involvement in various human activities can lead to conflicts between stakeholders involved (human-human conflicts) due to conflicting positions and opinions. In these scenarios, ethical issues may arise related to stakeholders’ values, views, beliefs, and social, economic, cultural, and environmental aspects. Conservation ethics allows for the inclusion and consideration of ethical issues, demands, and moral values of all parties involved within a scenario, referring to three dimensions: social ethics, which takes into account human needs; environmental ethics, which protects the interests of biological entities such as biodiversity and ecosystems; and animal ethics, which includes welfare aspects related to the individual animals. The ethical analysis examines and considers, through various tools such as the Ethical Matrices and the Ethical Delphi, human and non-human stakeholders’ values, interests, and needs, putting them on an equal footing and analysing the different decision paths that can be taken without imposing one to be followed. In the present work, the ethical assessment has been applied by analyzing procedures, choices and interface, interaction, and conflict scenarios between man and animal through values, attitudes, and opinions of different stakeholders, ensuring representativeness. Conducting these analyses and integrating different approaches such as the ethical, conflict and human dimensions analysis was the aim of this work, following the multidisciplinary nature of biodiversity conservation. The first section of this work presents the development of the ethical self-evaluation tool ETHAS for projects that adopt Genome Resources Banks (GRBs) and assisted reproduction techniques (ART) in wild vertebrate species and horses. In the second section, the Ethical Delphi is applied as a participatory method to gather the opinions and needs of experts for the assessment of animal welfare in Italian zoos on the one hand and to inform the revision of the South African legislation for wildlife management on the other. The third section includes studies that use human dimensions and ethical analysis to study stakeholders’ attitudes, views, and perceptions in a firste scenario to understand the human-bear conflict in Italy, highlighting the missing voices and ethical values in the public debate and the resulting imbalance, and in a second scenario investigate the knowledge and attitudes of visitors of an Italian protected area (Parco Regionale Monte Barro, Lecco) towards the European crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes). Employing these methodologies during this Ph.D. course enabled us to investigate different aspects of biodiversity conservation under the broad definition of conservation ethics. Integrating several methods allowed us to take the first steps towards innovative integrated approaches, marking a new path to address biodiversity conservation complexity, multidisciplinary, and plurality. This integrated approach has proved to be applicable at different levels, from the local to the national scale, making evident its adaptability. Furthermore, it may be adopted and developed in additional contexts in the future to ensure fair and inclusive biodiversity management for humans, animals, and biological entities.