Drawing on ongoing wildlife management programs across the Iberian Peninsula, this perspective piece challenges a common pattern in large-carnivore and scavenger conservation: treating captive breeding and reintroduction as the ultimate measure of success, regardless of whether the underlying threats — habitat loss, persecution, depleted prey — have actually been addressed. The authors argue that without minimizing those root drivers and honestly weighing the ecological and societal impacts of releasing animals back into the landscape, reintroduction risks becoming a symbolic fix rather than a path to real ecosystem resilience. The piece proposes complementary, longer-term actions and frames its argument as applicable well beyond Iberian species, to global conservation practice.
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