Can killing individual wild animals directly protect their population?

Ongoing extinctions are often accelerated by humans intentionally killing nonhumans. Commonly in Western conservation thinking, killing is seen as a strategy to prevent extinction. The hypothesis that killing one animal can protect the survivors of the same species (conspecifics) requires a direct cause‐and‐effect mechanism between the death of the target and the outcomes or consequences for the surviving conspecifics. Otherwise, an indirect pathway with an additional step must be described and evaluated. We find rare direct (that is, one‐step) causal logic to support the “kill one to save many conspecifics” idea. Rare circumstances involve threats posed by the animal killed. To explore the more likely indirect (two‐step) causal logic, we describe the study designs needed for comparative evaluations of killing versus non‐lethal alternatives. For practitioners seeking science‐informed decisions, our analysis clearly indicates a gap in the available data and a narrow set of conditions in which one should “kill a few to save many conspecifics”.