Greater consideration of the welfare of individual animals can contribute to population-level conservation success (i.e. healthy individuals result in a healthy population). Conservation, welfare, and ethical issues do not exist in isolation; conservation translocation practitioners identify them as interlinked. There are situations in conservation translocations where individual-level animal welfare concerns and population-level conservation concerns conflict, requiring trade-offs and generating difficult moral dilemmas. Conservation translocation practitioners would like more guidance on incorporating welfare considerations into their programmes, highlighting a need for standardised, taxon-specific guidelines, as well as increased communication among practitioners. Structured decision-making could be a useful approach for balancing or aligning welfare and conservation considerations and would provide transparency as to how these concerns are addressed. Overall, there is demand for increased consideration of individual animal welfare in conservation practice. Open, honest, and critical assessment of the issues is required, together with respectful dialogue, collaboration, and knowledge sharing among stakeholders.

Biological considerations are often a major focus in conservation translocations: they include the physiological, behavioural, demographic, and ecological considerations relevant to management decisions about translocation planning, implementation, and evaluation. The vast array of biological, and other, considerations that managers must wrestle with render conservation translocations exceedingly complex, and a framework that supports thinking through this complexity to inform decisions in a transparent and deliberative fashion is indispensable. Structured decision-making (SDM) is a framework that is well suited to help managers deal with the complexity of their decisions, and SDM facilitates the integration of science (biological knowledge) to inform decisions. Scientists supporting conservation translocations have many tools at their disposal to help them provide predictions of management outcomes that are as accurate as possible, recognising that various sources of data are valid, and there is substantial guidance available on the appropriate methods to obtain, analyse, and interpret available data. Decisions will represent a mix of objective scientific prediction and subjective attitudes regarding trade-offs between objectives and regarding the uncertainty surrounding predictions. All conservation translocation decisions can be informed using SDM irrespective of their focus being biological, non-biological, and perhaps most realistically a mix across these concerns.