It’s a strange irony of our times: in the name of saving life, we take it. Across the globe, conservation has evolved into a series of calculated killings. Grey squirrels are culled in Britain to protect their red cousins. Feral cats in Western Australia are poisoned by “grooming traps.” Caribbean lionfish—stunning to look at, devastating to reefs—are speared and served for dinner.

And in Florida’s Everglades, the Burmese python—a pet turned apex invader—faces an annual “Python Challenge,” where hundreds hunt them for cash rewards. It’s billed as conservation, but it plays out like a sport: spotlights in the dark, trucks crawling through swamps, hands wrestling scaled muscle before the final blow. Skins become handbags, bones become jewellery, fat turns into soap. It’s a grim, creative afterlife for a species that never asked to be there in the first place.

Now in India, that same moral puzzle is playing out in our streets and courtrooms. A recent Supreme Court order called for the removal of all stray dogs from Delhi and NCR into shelters, following rising cases of attacks. The ruling has been met with fierce backlash from animal welfare groups—while some political leaders, like Karnataka’s SL Bhojegowda, have openly justified large-scale culling as a solution, citing “safety of children.” His own chilling admission of killing 2,800 dogs years ago was framed not as cruelty, but as civic duty.

The truth is, none of these creatures arrived by choice. They were carried—deliberately or accidentally—by us. We built the conditions that made them thrive in the wrong places. And now, we also decide they must die.

So what, really, do we mean by “conservation”? Is it about preserving balance, or preserving the version of balance we prefer? At what point does saving one species justify erasing another?

We like to think of ourselves as custodians of the planet. But more often than not, we are playwrights, casting ourselves as both the hero and the executioner in nature’s story. Maybe the harder question is not how to conserve, but whether we can do so without constantly rewriting the rules in our favour.

It’s a tension I’ve seen up close in my work with snakes in India—something I explored in my post “Decoding the Human–Snake Conflict in India.”  There too, the problem is never just the animal; it’s the circumstances we’ve created around it. Whether it’s a python in Florida or a cobra in Karnataka, the real challenge isn’t deciding who lives or dies. It’s facing the uncomfortable truth that we set the stage for these conflicts in the first place.