Science brought the dire wolf back – but who’s thinking about its welfare?

9 April 2025, 09:54

The debate over de-extinction misses the point: Are these animals’ welfare needs being met?

In the wake of the recent announcement from Colossal Biosciences that they have ‘resurrected’ the dire wolf, there has been a lot of (justified) pushback on whether what they’ve created is truly a dire wolf, as opposed to a slightly modified ‘dire-like’ wolf. But this debate might be missing the most important question about this (and similar) projects: Are these animals’ welfare needs actually being met?

We’ve heard little about how the wolves are being housed or raised. And there’s good reason to worry that they can’t be provided with what they need to truly flourish. Dire wolves have been extinct for over 10,000 years, which means we don’t know very much about how they lived, how they behaved, or what they need.

Given that they’re really just modified grey wolves, perhaps we can use the needs of grey wolf needs as a rough guide, but we shouldn’t be confident in this. The genetic modifications could change their behaviour, what they want, or even the way they feel or experience the world, in ways we don’t yet understand or can’t predict. Not to mention that grey wolves aren’t easy to keep well in captivity. They’re wide-ranging and socially complex, highly active predators who often suffer from boredom and stress in captivity.

If these wolf pups are learning to hunt or socialise, who are they learning this from? Who is their pack? And where would they pick up any species-specific dire wolf behaviours that might once have passed down between generations?

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the technology and its possibilities. But we should never forget that these animals aren’t just science experiments – they’re sentient beings with their own needs, desires, and points of view on the world that matter for their own sake.

Every de-extinction project should have a clear and publicly available welfare plan: how they will meet the species’ physical and psychological needs, detect and respond to welfare problems, and how welfare will be assessed and monitored over time. If we’re going to ‘resurrect’ animals from extinction, we owe it to them to treat them not just as products of a lab but as subjects in their own right.

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Heather Browning is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton.

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