Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference

More than a decade ago Schmidt (1989) called for consideration of animal welfare to become a "first-order" decision rule in wildlife management concerns, including animal damage control. Although there has been movement in that direction, this clearly has not yet come to pass. This paper takes a brief look at the interests we call animal damage management, animal welfare and protection, animal rights, and environmentalism in order to speculate about their shared concerns and the uncertain future before them. Since animal damage and the management of that damage cannot be abstracted from the environmental context in which they occur, this leads to speculation that some confluence of the interests of animal damage management, animal protection, and environmentalism will lead to a new disciplinary focus in the future.