The Critical Role of Psychology in the Conservation of Nonhuman Animals Lori Marino The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and Emory University, Atlanta, GA Traditional conservation practices, which focus on population size and species-level viability analyses, are missing a crucial component of conservation: the individual animals who make up these aggregates. Furthermore, invasive interventions such as culling, translocation, habitat restriction and “sustainable harvesting”, create more problems than they solve because these practices do not take into account the lives and welfare of individual animals. As a result, several conservation practices that rely upon “numbers” as a metric for success or invasive approaches have not only failed to protect certain populations, they have made matters worse. Examples include the ongoing problematic attempts to protect the African elephants, the justification of wild captures of cetaceans for “conservation “ purposes, and the culling of wolves to resolve humananimal conflicts. It is critical that conservation take a more scientifically – informed, and frankly, progressive, approach to nonhuman intelligence and sensitivities by acknowledging the data on the complexity of their social networks, families, cultural traditions, and psychosocial development and, thus, not only preserving numbers of individuals but the individuals themselves.