Horses for Courses? How rewilding might challenge the ways we care for animals

1. Introduction: Animals in Rewilding 

Rewilding – which aims to promote natural processes and biodiversity, while over time reducing human influence on the land – is increasingly popular, not least in Europe. Many such projects involve reintroducing native animals that no longer exist locally, in order to help recreate natural processes and habitats. In Scotland, for instance, beavers have been reintroduced to help reconstruct lost wetland ecosystems; in Romania, bison have been brought back to open up undergrowth, distribute seeds, and to create landscape variety. 

But sometimes, the animals needed to create or maintain particular natural processes are extinct. In Europe, this is true of the key large grazing animals, including wild bovines such as aurochs, and wild equines such as tarpan horses, once lynchpins of mixed forest and grassland ecosystems. Without grazing, or browsing, animals, preventing these lands from becoming shrublands or forests requires constant human intervention. 

One solution currently being adopted, in countries such as the Netherlands, is using “proxy animals” -  animals that resemble, in genetic makeup or in appearance, the now extinct species. This has led to the use of  semi-wild breeds of horses (Konik) and cattle (Heck) derived from domesticated horses and cattle. However, increasingly, at various European sites, hardy varieties of domestic cattle and horses are being introduced to rewilded areas to take on the grazing roles that now extinct native wild animals used to play. 

As we’ll suggest here, this raises some difficult questions about how such animals should be managed, and cared for: Should these animals be treated as wild animals, true to the spirit of rewilding projects, which would essentially leave them to fend for themselves through cold winters, droughts, and shortages of food? Or would doing so be ethically wrong, since it could be argued that we have a duty of care for these animals, as they have been bred as domestic animals? 

Here, we’ll explore some of the key ethical questions that rewilding with domestic animals raises, focusing our attention, for clarity, on a particular case involving the use of horses for rewilding in Denmark’s National Nature Parks. 

Working through a case: Horses in Danish National Nature Parks

In Denmark, which lacks much in the way of wild countryside, new rewilding areas  called National Nature Parks (NNPs) are now being established. These are placed in state owned areas, typically forests, ranging from 5-30 km2 in size, and surrounded by a fence. The fence will allow, at least to some degree, wildlife that’s already present (such as foxes and deer) to migrate to and from the area. At the same time, the fence will make it impossible for horses, or any other large domestic animals brought in to help rewild the area through grazing and browsing, to escape. The fencing maintains high grazing pressure in order to help create the required ecological conditions, while avoiding conflicts with surrounding landowners, such as farmers, from escaping animals. Once the parks are established, the overall goal of the NNPs is to manage with as light a touch as possible, a so-called reactive management scheme, since these parks are supposed to be wild places. Consistency with this, then, would mean, to the extent allowed by existing legislation, treating the horses as wild animals, despite their domestic origins.

Let’s look more closely at the management options here:

First, let’s consider the idea of treating the horses wholly as wild animals, with minimal human management. This would involve releasing them into the parks and leaving them to fend for themselves. Over time, if they are allowed to reproduce naturally, the horses would gradually adapt through natural selection, as many populations of wild-living horses elsewhere do – one example being a population of horses that have lived on Sable Island in Canada, a 40-kilometer-long sandbar 161 kilometers off the coast of Nova Scotia, for over 200 years. But this would most likely mean that many horses would starve to death and suffer from injuries and disease, especially in cold winters, giving rise to large swings in population. For example, at Sable Island, it was reported that the population dropped to 150, from 359, after a harsh winter in 1980. Moreover, members of even an adapted population of horses would be likely to have relatively short lives with periods of extreme hunger, and high levels of parasitic infection. From a perspective that’s only focused on ecological restoration, this type of management might well help to create and maintain the desired natural conditions. But this option clearly runs counter to current animal welfare legislation in Denmark, where those in charge of the horses have a duty of care as long as the horses are fenced in.

An alternative management route is to treat these horses pretty much like those who now live in direct human care in equestrian facilities, where shelter and medical care are routinely provided and where sterilisation is used to manage population size and horse behaviour. When food supplies run low, on this approach, the horses would be provided with extra fodder, and they would certainly not be allowed to die of starvation in cold winters. If the horses are treated like this, their populations wouldn’t as quickly evolve to become hardier, but individual horses would live longer, healthier lives. However, for various reasons, this approach may well be less good for restoring ecological processes and promoting natural behaviour in horse populations. If supplementary food is provided, horses get used to eating only the more tasty “juicy” grasses; this can affect the development of wild vegetation and the creation of a more heterogeneous landscape; in addition the nutrients in the supplementary food can affect vegetative growth. And  horses may not only become acclimatized to human provision, but also expect human visitors to provide food and therefore be less wild in their behaviour. And sterilisation would, of course, dramatically change the natural behaviour of the horses. For these reasons this approach hasn’t been proposed for the Danish NNPs. Instead, it’s been proposed that horses should be culled or removed to other areas in order to keep populations within the limits that the habitat provides, and so to head off starvation when food is in short supply. Furthermore, horses that have been seriously injured or are dying could be euthanized. 

So, rewilded horses could be treated in different ways. But what to choose is fraught with ethical disagreement, and within Denmark there are vehement and passionate arguments on all sides – some of which challenge the currently favoured management approach. Thus, one side, vocal in the debate, prefers a strongly hands-off approach , while another side wants the horses in the parks to be treated and managed like other horses in human care. That’s because, we’ll go on to argue, this case raises questions about deeply engrained ethical commitments concerning both how animals should be treated, relative to the context they are in, and how so-called wild areas should be managed. One of the key issues here concerns how rewilded horses are thought to be categorized, in terms of their place on a spectrum from wild to domestic. We’ll first outline one way of thinking about these distinctions, and use this to inform an analysis of the rewilded horse debate. 

2. Two Distinctions

In order to analyse the situation of the rewilded horses more carefully,  it’s helpful to to be able to locate them in relation to broader groupings that pick out different aspects of animals’ context. Here, we want to distinguish between:

1. Animals kept by humans vs. animals living independently.  The animals kept by humans are directly cared for or managed through housing, fencing, feeding, veterinary care, and so on.

2. Domesticated vs. non-domesticated animals. The domesticated animals are defined by a degree of genetic adaption due to selection over many generations in a human-controlled environment.

Based on these two distinctions, animals can be divided into four groups:

The question then arises: Where do rewilded horses belong?

Horses used in rewilding projects, of the type described in Denmark, belong among the domesticated animals, in that they have been selectively bred. But they cannot be neatly described as either being entirely kept by humans, or as living wholly independently. Furthermore, over time, through a potential process of de-domestication the horses may end up somewhere between being domesticated and non-domesticated. Thus, at the end of the day the rewilded horses may end up cutting across all four groups!

The implication of cutting across all groups is that our norms of how to treat these animals are challenged. Conventional ethical norms for how to treat and care for animals tend to rely on the distinctions between wild and domestic, where 1) and 4) are relatively straightforward and have well-recognized norms (as we’ll explain in the next section). Conversely, groups 2) and 3) generate more uncertainty and ethical debate, which we will not go further into here, but which some of us have pursued elsewhere. 

3. Wild and Domestic Animals: Some Background

Within Europe, horses are a domesticated species – they have been genetically selected over many generations. One common effect of domestication is that the animals have been bred in ways that make them unable to live independently, or at least only able to do so with difficulty; these animals often require human provision and other forms of care. Indeed, many domesticated animals including most horses are also domestic animals, on our above distinction: they are kept confined and are provided for by humans. And, of course if people want dependent domestic animals to do things for them – if they want the animals as companions, or as sources for food, for instance – then they need to continue to provide provision. 

Over time, however, and especially over the past half-century, there’s been an increasing recognition that domestic animals are not just beings with useful functions for human needs. They also have their own interests and welfare – they can be harmed or benefited; they can suffer and enjoy things, they have their own desires and goals – they have their own lives. This, it is widely agreed, creates certain ethical commitments to domestic animals that are dependent on us. What these commitments should include, at least as a minimum, was more formally constructed in the declaration of ”Five Freedoms” - that domestic animals should  be able to live free of hunger and thirst; discomfort; pain injury and disease; fear and distress; and be able to perform normal behaviour for their own good, not just for ours. Indeed, there’s now a complex network of animal welfare law in Europe more or less in line with the Five Freedoms, that requires care for domestic animals, based on which people can face legal charges if they fail to take proper care of animals for whom they have responsibility.

However, the situation is very different for wild animals, animals that (on our above distinction) are not genetically selected, and also live their lives relatively independently of us. Here, there’s not the same legal framework to provide care for the animals – so, for instance, landowners don’t have an obligation to provide food for wild animals that live on their land. Nothing like the Five Freedoms is applied to wild animals. And this legal situation reflects a widespread ethical view on which wild animals should be left alone to live their own lives. 

It's worth noting that it’s not that people generally deny that wild animals can suffer, for instance when there’s little food after a heavy snowfall. But the suffering of wild animals is often downplayed, seen as an inevitable part of a wild life. In addition, what’s actually thought of as good for wild animals seems to be different from domestic ones. The emphasis in the case of wild animal welfare has tended to be about protecting their capacity to live free of human intervention and to make their own choices about how to live their lives. Freedom of behaviour, rather than freedom from suffering, seems to be at the core of a widespread commonsense idea of what’s good for wild animal welfare. 

In addition, many wild animals live in unmanaged natural surroundings. So, there are also concerns that interventions to reduce wild animal suffering would prevent so-called ecosystemic and evolutionary processes from functioning properly, and also undermine the wildness value attributed to places on the very grounds that human influence on them is minimized. 

Of course, there are some exceptions here. In some places, for instance, wild deer are hunted or culled in order to prevent mass starvation or to make the natural regeneration of stands of trees possible. But roughly, and in practice, the distinction between what’s owed to wild and domestic animals is widely observed.  This means that being “wild” or “domestic” is not only a descriptive, conceptual distinction, but also a normative one, meaning that we owe different things to domestic animals than to wild ones. And this is exactly why deciding how to manage domestic animals in rewilding projects is such an ethical challenge. 

4. The Ethical Challenges of Domestic Animals in Rewilding Projects

The idea of putting domestic horses into rewilding projects clearly challenges these traditional boundaries between wild and domestic animals. These horses have been selectively bred (domesticated) to live alongside people, and they are also domestic – kept by people and dependent on them for food, shelter and veterinary care. But now the plan in rewilding areas, like the Danish NNPs, is to cross ‘boundaries’, and put the horses into wild environments where traditionally, wild animals are largely unmanaged, and care is certainly not provided. So, while initially, at least, remaining domesticated in terms of their genes, they are being moved from a domestic environment of care to an environment of seemingly greater independence. What does this mean for their treatment? Does this suggest that there’s something problematic about these categories themselves? Two especially interesting concerns emerge here,  and they both link into emerging discussions about animal welfare and animal and environmental ethics.

First, does it make sense to have a normative distinction between wild and domestic animals at all, and hence to treat them differently? Perhaps animals that are conscious and can feel pain or pleasure should all be treated roughly the same. This kind of argument could go either way: that we owe wild animals a duty of care just as we do domestic ones; or that we owe much less to domestic ones than is widely thought. 

Second, and relatedly, this raises questions about what’s best for animals – their welfare. As we suggested above, there seems to be a different idea about a good life for animals, depending on whether animals are wild or domestic. But perhaps this is wrong. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to have different ideas of welfare for wild and domestic animals?  We can use these rewilded horses as a way into thinking through these questions. To do so, we’ll start by looking at some recent developments in ethics that seem broadly sympathetic to these questions – in particular to closing the ethical gap between wild and domestic animals.

5. Wild and Domestic Animal Ethics: Closing the gap

We noted above that the gap between care for wild and domestic animals might be closed in two different ways: by arguing that the care given to domestic animals should be reduced, or that the care given to wild animals should be increased. 

There haven’t been many arguments for the former view – that we should care less for domestic animals. Historically, some environmental ethicists – for instance, Holmes Rolston - did maintain that domestic animals had “no right or welfare claim to have from humans a kinder treatment than in nonhuman nature”. And some biologists do hold related views. For example, in Denmark, where a debate has raged in relation to these new rewilding areas, one an expert on biodiversity and a conservation biologist, Dr. Rasmus Ejrnæs from Aarhus University, comments: 

"I propose an alternative ethical perspective, inspired by my teachers in yoga and meditation: Suffering is caused by our obsessive habit to crave positive experiences and reject negative experiences. Freedom and love come from accepting life. ... domestic animal researchers have lost the plot when they believe that wild life is far too unpleasant and therefore unethical. If you take the idea to its conclusion we must eradicate parasites and predators and introduce birth control pills, health insurance and pain relief for wild herbivores.”

This not only echoes the seemingly widespread view that we should leave wild animals to their own devices, but appears to go quite a step further, suggesting that we could even back off from suffering reduction in domestic animals – and perhaps humans too!

However, in contrast, there’s an increasingly common view that there are duties of care to all animals whether wild or domestic. Such perspectives can be found among the general public, as well as being defended (in certain respects) by some conservation scientists, and more broadly within philosophy.

Studies of public views have been led by Michael Manfredo and a research team at the University of Colorado. These studies have charted the rise of what has been labelled “wildlife mutualism”.  On this view, wildlife is seen as “part of one’s social network” and “worthy of care and compassion”, and wild animals are often perceived as and mentioned in human terms. While the surveys don’t go into detail on what these views mean in practice, people who hold such views, often in urban populations, have tended to turn against practices such as hunting, and are inclined to engage in “welfare-seeking” behaviour for individual animals.

An increased sense that wild animals matter as individuals, and should be treated with care and compassion, also seems to be growing in some environmental conservation circles. One example of this is the growth in the “Compassionate Conservation” movement. Some of those affiliated with this movement are conservationists, who affirm the prevalent view among conservationists of the value of protecting whole ecosystems and whole species. However, they also argue that, as far as possible, conservation interventions should not harm any of the animals involved. So, for instance, they are largely opposed to using slow-working poisons that cause suffering to reduce unwanted animal “pests”, even where the ultimate goal is environmental protection; wild animals, as sentient beings, should be treated with care.

Thirdly, philosophers have also debated these issues. Some philosophers, such as Josh Milburn (2022), have argued that where humans have put wild animals at risk – for instance, directly through damaging their habitat, or indirectly through climate change – they have special responsibilities to assist those animals, but this doesn’t extend to include broader responsibilities to care for all wild animals (this is sometimes called a contextual approach).  

Recently, though, there’s been an upsurge in more radical ethical views. The Spanish philosopher Oscar Horta, for example, argues that there is reason to intervene to prevent, or at any rate alleviate, the suffering of wild animals irrespective of whether the suffering was brought about by humans. According to Horta, for example, mass vaccination of wild animals, similar to the already-practised vaccination of foxes against rabies to protect human health, is desirable. But this should be undertaken on behalf of, and for, the wild animals themselves, not just for human benefit. Denial of this, it is argued, would be an expression of speciesism – unjustified discrimination between species, where species membership, and whether an animal is wild or domestic, is irrelevant to an animal’s ability to suffer. But obviously, given the extent of wild animal suffering, this implies a significant burden on human beings. 

These arguments all tend to understand welfare primarily in terms of avoiding and reducing suffering, rather than protecting or enhancing animals’ freedom and autonomy. So there’s an interesting shift here: ideas about welfare as suffering-avoidance, traditionally ascribed to domestic animals, are being shifted to wild animals. For these philosophers, a dynamic wild nature with lots of suffering is something that we must combat, just as we have combated infectious diseases and infant mortality in humans – and in some domestic animals, for example dogs and pigs. Whereas in wild boars only around 1 of 10 piglets will survive, in domestic pig production many more survive, and it is seen as a serious welfare and ethical issue if mortality is high (though still much lower than among wild pigs). 

What, then, does all this mean for horses being used in rewilding projects? We see a radical position in one direction, as argued by some environmental ethicists and conservation biologists, where we should in general be less – if at all – concerned about suffering. Suffering is acceptable and natural (in all animals), and, maybe surprisingly, part of what constitutes a good life; that applies to rewilded animals too, including our rewilded horses. At the other extreme, there’s an argument that we should care for all sentient animals, and we need to extend this care to all wild animals and rewilded animals, and try to avert their suffering as is practicable, with vaccinations, supplementary feeding, etc.

We think that both these positions are too extreme. We favour a somewhat different, more balanced approach to rewilded horses as an ethical position (we’re not here going to discuss legal requirements). In addition, we want to revisit the idea of the freedom to make choices about behaviour as being an important part of wild animal welfare – and indeed, suggest that this is an idea that could be more strongly emphasized in domestic animal welfare too.

6. Some Proposals for the Ethical Management of Rewilded Horses

We should begin by acknowledging that what’s considered to be “ethical” management will depend on which values are acknowledged and prioritized. Here we’ll begin by focusing on one value that has been important here – animal welfare – and conclude by mentioning some other potentially relevant values.

As we’ve seen, the idea that animal welfare should be measured only in terms of suffering, and its absence, has been influential when it comes to extending welfare concerns from domestic animals to wild animals, and has been dominating the conversation about the welfare of rewilded horses. But welfare can also be understood in many ways, including “animal autonomy”— where animals have more control over their own lives and are able to make their own choices. It is surely plausible that being able to perform natural behaviours, and being in charge of one’s own life – where to move, what to eat, with whom to mate and so on – is intrinsically valuable to non-human animals as it is to humans. What’s more, autonomy is an aspect of animal welfare where wild animals generally do better than domestic ones. Even though wild animal autonomy can be limited in various ways — for instance by predators, food supply, or environmental conditions — wild animals are, nonetheless, largely in charge of their own lives. In contrast, most domestic animals’ lives are largely dictated by their human owners.

Elevating the importance of autonomy in welfare has implications for the management of horses in rewilding projects. For instance, horse populations can be managed, to some degree, by pharmaceutical fertility control. This could, for instance, prevent horses from reproducing to the extent that they outstrip their resources and become malnourished, while also avoiding horse culls that could achieve the same end. Adoption of pharmaceutical fertility control understands good welfare as avoiding suffering, or at least avoiding direct physical suffering in terms of wounding from bullets or starvation. But it also changes animals’ mating and reproductive behaviours, and the structure of populations, which in turn changes the social options for animals significantly, so reducing their autonomy.14  While we’re not arguing against the use of fertility control in all circumstances, we are suggesting that there are implications for horses’ lives that go beyond suffering understood in a narrower sense of fear and pain, and that affects some of their important life choices. 

On a side note, we also think this idea is applicable to domestic as well as wild animals, and that, in the case of domestic animals, freedom should have a higher priority when thinking about welfare. Take, for instance, an indoor cat. His or her life may be safe from cars and predators, but it might also be a life with few choices, and a lack of stimulation and excitement. So, while on balance there may, overall, be reasons to confine some cats, the loss of the value of freedom and natural behaviour, and therefore the need to provide meaningful replacement forms of stimulation,  should play a serious role in decisions about their welfare.

This, focus on freedom, though, should not be taken to mean that we think that domestic horses put into rewilding projects should be treated entirely as wild animals and completely left to fend for themselves. Neither we are saying that suffering does not matter. Rather, we are claiming that it is not obvious that autonomy should always be sacrificed to prevent suffering. Nonetheless, avoiding the worst extremes of suffering, including of starvation, does seem important; and being starving in any case restricts autonomy as well as causing suffering. So this speaks to supplementary feeding  – which we think can be provided in ways that don’t interfere with natural soil nutrients nor acclimatize horses to human beings – when the resource supply is particularly bad. It may be also an option to remove horses where doing so could relieve pressure on resources. 

More generally, we also think that euthanizing animals that are dying painfully can be ethically justified because at this stage there is no benefit to the horse’s welfare from having additional autonomy, and nothing is lost from being euthanized except extreme suffering. So, while respect for autonomy would speak in favor of less rather than more intervention, there may still be situations where intervention can be ethically justified. 

Finally, as noted above, animal welfare is not all that’s at stake when considering what “ethical” management of horses in rewilding projects should include. As we pointed out at the beginning, horses are being introduced to rewilding areas to perform particular functions – focused on the promotion of other values, such as biodiversity, ecosystem flourishing, and wildness, the latter understood as something like humans “stepping back” to let the non-human world “do its own thing”. This idea of wildness does tie in well with our emphasis on animal autonomy, since one way of thinking about autonomy is animals doing their own thing. But it may also be broader than this – after all, the idea of NNPs is that the whole area is wild, or at least relatively free from human influence. Since many people regard this as an important value, that could be a further reason for reducing intervention with rewilded horses, alongside the autonomy of the animals themselves.

Given other factors, such as climate change, invasive species and other human-originating disturbances, it nevertheless does not seem likely that NNPs will function without significant human intervention. This is especially true if one goal is to protect biodiversity, since climate change and invasive species won’t respect the fences around NNPs, and will impact on biodiversity anyway. So perhaps the value of wildness should not be over-estimated. Even so, welfare interventions to protect rewilded horses may be in conflict with other values that the NNPs are supposed to promote. And this may lead to difficult choices. We do think, however, that preventing starvation and euthanizing suffering horses is ethically non-negotiable. But other decisions will likely need to be made in the light of multiple and competing environmental values.

References

1) Christian Gamborg, Bart Gremmen, Stine B. Christiansen, Peter Sandøe (2010) De-Domestication: Ethics at the Intersection of Landscape Restoration and Animal Welfare Environmental Values 19/1 pp. 57-78.

2) Moira Donovan (2022). Romance, Politics, and Ecological Damage: The Saga of Sable Island’s Wild Horses:They’ve roamed free for hundreds of years, but is that freedom harming the ecosystem they call home? Hakai magazine. 

https://hakaimagazine.com/features/romance-politics-and-ecological-damage-the-saga-of-sable-islands-wild-horses/

3) Sandøe, P., Gamborg, C., & Palmer, C. (2022). Will the use of domesticated animals in rewilding projects compromise animal welfare? In D. Bruce, & A. Bruce (Eds.), Transforming food systems: ethics, innovation and responsibility (pp. 159-164). Wageningen Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-939-8_23

4) See Palmer C, Morrin H & Sandøe P (2020). Defensible zoos and aquariums. In Bob Fischer (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics (pp. 394-406) New York, NY: Routledge and Thuesen IS, Agerholm JS, Mejer H, Nielsen SS & Sandøe P. (2022). How Serious Are Health-Related Welfare Problems in Unowned Unsocialised Domestic Cats? A Study from Denmark Based on 598 Necropsies. Animals 12/662 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12050662  

5) Farm Animal Welfare Council (2009) Farm Animal Welfare in Great Britain: Past, Present and Future. London: Farm Animal Welfare Council. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7d89fe40f0b64fe6c24508/Farm_Animal_Welfare_in_Great_Britain_-_Past__Present_and_Future.pdf 

6) Rolston, Holmes, III. (1988) Environmental Ethics: Values in and Duties to the Natural World. Philadelphia: Temple University Press p.59.

7) Authors’ translation. Quoted from Sandøe, P., Christensen, J. W., & Herskin, M. (2023). Dyrevelfærd eller naturlighed? Et centralt dilemma i forvaltningen af vilde og forvildede dyr. Politiken, 3 August 2023. https://dyreetik.ku.dk/debatindlaeg/2023/dyrevelfaerd-eller-naturlighed/

8) Manfredo, M.J., Teel, T.L., Don Carlos, A.W., Sullivan, L., Bright, A.D., Dietsch, A.M., Bruskotter, J. and Fulton, D. (2020), The changing sociocultural context of wildlife conservation. Conservation Biology 34: 1549-1559. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13493

9) Daniel Ramp, Marc Bekoff (2015) Compassion as a Practical and Evolved Ethic for Conservation BioScience 65/3 pp. 323–327, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu223

10) Clare Palmer (2010) Animal Ethics in Context. New York: Columbia University Press; Josh Milburn (2022) Just Fodder. McGill-Queen’s University Press..

11) Oscar Horta & Dayron Teran (2023) Reducing Wild Animal Suffering Effectively: Why Impracticability and Normative Objections Fail Against the Most Promising Ways of Helping Wild Animals, Ethics, Policy & Environment, DOI: 10.1080/21550085.2023.2200726 

12) Palmer, C., Fischer, B., Gamborg, C., Hampton, J. & Sandøe, P. (2023). Wildlife Ethics: The Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

13) Palmer, C., & Sandøe, P. (2018). Welfare. In: Lori Gruen (ed.), Critical Terms for Animal Studies, pp. 424-438. Chicago, US: University of Chicago Press

14) See a discussion of this in relation to wildlife management in: Gamborg, C., Palmer, C. & Sandøe, P. (2020). Ethical management of wildlife. Lethal and non-lethal control of white-tailed deer. Conservation Science and Practice 2:e171 https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.171