The short version: "let's bring more wildlife back" sounds like an easy good idea. It isn't, once you think about what actually happens to those animals after they're born. More wild animals doesn't just mean more animals living happily in nature — it means more animals starving, getting eaten, or getting sick, because that's what happens to most wild animals, as we cover in our piece on wild animal suffering.
The math nobody says out loud
Imagine a rewilding project doubles the number of deer in a forest. On paper, that's a win: more deer, "nature restored." But ask a different question: of those extra deer, how many will actually live a good life, and how many will starve slowly over a hard winter or get run down by wolves before they're even a year old? For most wild animals, the honest answer is that a lot of "more animals" just means "more animals dying young and painfully" — not more animals living well.
"Restoring habitat" sounds like giving animals a home. It rarely gets described as also giving more animals the same short, hard death that habitat has always produced.
This isn't a fringe idea — real researchers study this
Some philosophers and scientists who study animal welfare — Oscar Horta and Brian Tomasik are two names worth knowing — have pointed out that conservation as a field rarely asks this question. It tends to treat "more wild nature" as automatically good, the same way you might assume "more trees" is automatically good, without asking what life is actually like for the animals living there. This isn't an accusation that conservationists are being dishonest. It's that the field has mostly measured success in acres and headcounts, not in what any individual animal actually experiences.
What we're not saying
We're not saying destroy habitats, stop conservation work, or go intervene in nature ourselves. We hold the same view here as in our wild animal suffering piece: nobody actually knows how to safely intervene in an ecosystem without risking making things worse, so we're not asking anyone to try yet. What we are saying is that "more habitat, more animals" shouldn't get a free pass just because it sounds nice. It deserves the same scrutiny as any other decision that predictably creates more short, hard lives.
What we'd actually want to see
Three things: conservation money going toward safe, non-lethal ways to manage animal populations — not just counting acres and animals. Honest public conversation admitting that "more wild nature" and "more suffering" often go together, instead of pretending they don't. And less treating rewilding as an automatic feel-good cause in fundraising pitches, when the real picture is a lot more complicated than that. This is the same logic behind everything else Extinction For All argues: more life isn't automatically good, whether it's a new pet, a new child, or a new deer population — it's a real cost that deserves real scrutiny.