S7E6: Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp
This episode dives into the principles of compassionate conservation, emphasizing the importance of recognizing individual lives and experiences in conservation efforts. Daniel Ramp outlines how traditional conservation often overlooks the welfare of specific animals, leading to harmful outcomes, and presents compelling arguments for integrating compassion into conservation policies and practices.
About Daniel Ramp
Daniel Ramp is a behavioural ecologist, welfare expert, and conservation biologist specializing in transdisciplinary approaches to coexistence and sustainability. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), where he is an Associate Professor in the Transdisciplinary School. He leads the development of research, teaching, and public outreach in the centre, where the goal is to stimulate innovation, novel research, and conservation practices that promote multispecies flourishing. Dan conducts research on compassionate conservation, wild animal welfare, environmental ethics, and wildlife ecology, while also collaborating widely with other disciplines. He has led many large research projects, working with government and industry to engage in evidenced-based policy transformation that promote multispecies coexistence and sustainability, particularly in production landscapes around the world. His passion is reimagining what nature conservation can be and who it is for.
Featured:
Centre for Compassionate Conservation
Ecology. Whose conservation? By Georgina Mace
Preventing extinction in an age of species migration and planetary change by Erick Lundgren et al
Failing Forward: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Conservation by Robert Fletcher
The elephant (head) in the room: A critical look at trophy hunting by Chelsea Batavia et al
Community Led Conservation with Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka on The Animal Turn
ANIMAL HIGHLIGHT:
Rashmi tells us about some of the challenges dogs in Kaza, a settlement in the cold-desert Spiti region. She discusses how changes in tourism and accessibility of food change the dogs’ life chances and how some women are trying to forge kinder multispecies relations with the dogs.
Dogs of Kaza
“Compassionate conservation asks us to act as enlightened beings, with the capacity to be virtuous, just, and compassionate, so that we may reconsider our responsibilities and relationality to the more-than-human world" (Daniel Ramp, unpublished paper).
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast and Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies for sponsoring this season. Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work, Rashmi Singh Rana for the Animal Highlight. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.