THERE is a danger that the people closest to the practical business of wildlife conservation fail to understand the political threat creeping quietly through our world.
Gamekeepers, rangers, game managers, veterinarians and landowners are, by necessity, grounded in reality. They deal with animals as animals – living, competing, breeding, dying – inside complex ecosystems that do not bend to sentiment. Their focus is on welfare, sustainability and survival. Precisely because they are so rooted in practice, many underestimate the ideological assault gathering strength beyond the fence line. That assault goes by a benign name: animal rights.
At first glance it looks like compassion. Scratch the surface and it behaves more like a parasite. In nature, parasites do not announce themselves as killers. They arrive quietly, often improving their host’s short-term condition while undermining its long-term health. Consider the cordyceps fungus, which colonises an insect’s nervous system and alters its behaviour. The host climbs, apparently of its free will, to a height where it expels its spores to infect nearby insects and dies. Animal rights ideology follows a similar path.
The process usually begins with animal welfare, a legitimate and necessary concern. No one denies the moral responsibility to minimise unnecessary suffering. Welfare is about how animals are treated, not whether humans may use animals at all. In Africa, regulated hunting, when properly managed, has long been one of the most effective tools for conservation and welfare: it gives animals economic value while alive, keeps land under wildlife rather than cattle, supports rural communities and funds habitat protection. But welfare is the entry point for activists.
From welfare, activists introduce the idea of soft rights. These are not rights in law, merely rhetorical devices: animals ‘deserve’ this, animals ‘have a right’ to that. The language is emotional, not legal. It feels harmless – after all, who could object to kindness? Yet this is the moment the parasite crosses the boundary and press-gangs MPs and animal lovers alike into becoming its foot soldiers.
They feel part of a greater moral crusade. Soft rights then harden into hard rights and laws ‘to protect those rights’. What was once a metaphor becomes a statute. Animals are no longer managed resources but moral patients. At this stage, a new class emerges: self-appointed experts, or worse, holders of pseudo-qualifications in wildlife ethics or animal rights. Like philosopher-kings, they claim superior ethical insight and insist on being recognised as stakeholders in every decision, from land use to predator control to hunting quotas.
Once inside the system, the pressure intensifies. Welfare standards become legal tripwires. Litigation and lawfare, often backed by unlimited funds from appeals to naive animal lovers, become the weapon of choice. Flexibility vanishes. Conservation, which by its nature requires adaptation to droughts, population booms, disease outbreaks and local conditions, is forced into rigid, one-size-fits-all moral frameworks designed in distant cities by people who have never skinned a carcass, watched a lion starve, or had a year’s crops eaten in a single night. The result is predictable.
Costs rise and funds are diverted to compliance and legal battles, supporting the animal rights industry and its proponents. Red tape strangles. The compliance burden becomes intolerable. Private and indigenous landowners abandon wildlife for less burdensome livestock. Community benefits dry up. Poaching increases. Habitat fragments. The very animals whose ‘rights’ were invoked lose their protection as living, economically valuable beings and revert to being pests or competitors. Eventually, the natural ecology collapses. Regulated hunting is banned or stifled, conservation budgets are gutted, rural livelihoods destroyed. Urban-centric civilisation spreads further over nature. The parasite has consumed its host. And then, as parasites do when the host dies, the spores drift on, seeking the next industry to infect.
The great irony is that rights themselves are a product of civilisation. Rights do not exist in nature. Outside the human cave – outside law, language, and shared moral agreement – there are no rights, only relationships, competition and survival. A lion does not respect the ‘rights’ of a zebra, nor a cat the ‘rights’ of a mouse. Nature is neither cruel nor kind; it simply is.
Animal welfare is a human choice and sentiment, extended outward from civilisation. The concept of animal rights attempts to project civilisation’s internal rules on to the wild and in doing so, it erases the very mechanisms that allow wildlife to survive alongside humans. If hunting and sustainable use are to survive, conservationists must stop treating animal rights as a harmless moral fashion. It is a political ideology with a proven pattern of infiltration and destruction. Ignore it, and it will walk your industry up the stem of a blade of grass, clamp its jaws, and wait for the spores to burst.
Evolution lives, and so does a parasite. But only if we let it.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on January 5, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
