Conservation biologists don't usually advocate captive breeding except as a last resort (doesn't mean it hasn't happened), I think because experience has taught two things.



The first is that the reasons why a particular species has declined are often really hard to fix up -- they don't usually have anything to do with an inability of the remaining animals to breed. They breed just fine, the young just don't make it. Until you reverse the causes of decline out in nature, it's a waste of time to put CB animals out there to die also. You've said this too, so we all agree on that. What that means, though, is that if the habitat is OK, the animals don't usually need our help in captivity.



The second is that captive breeding gets expensive quickly, meaning there is less money available for, and often less emphasis on, securing and fixing up habitat. Captive breeding makes good TV (finally, we're doing something), while making some area a reserve doesn't (it just sits there, and you can't pet the babies). In a less cuddly sense, outfits that want to chew up a place will sometimes offer to pay to "just breed 'em in a cage, and set 'em free", again with a lot of TV coverage. Free to where, is the point.



Two examples. Houston Zoo got a bunch of money to breed Houston toads and put the juveniles back in places where the species used to occur. They bred a bunch (released something like a million toadlets at about 30 places over 5 years, if I recall rightly). Nobody ever saw any of them again, and those 30 places still have no Houston toads. Nobody knows what went wrong, but the guessing is that some habitat feature had changed, and it wasn't addressed in part because all the money went into captive breeding.



Close to where I live here the university owns about 20 acres of dunes bordering the beach. The feds (USFWS) made them close it to partying and dogs, because an almost-extinct shorebird sometimes tried to breed there. Everybody hated that, because then they only had the other 20 miles of beaches here to party and run dogs on. Funny thing, in the next three years they had 3, then 30-some, then almost a hundred of these birds hatch out there and make it, basically because people and dogs weren't running the parent birds off all the time so crows could pinch the eggs and hatchlings.



If the habitat is OK, mother nature is still the best breeder.

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