Preservation of large carnivores is one of the greatest conservation challenges facing the world today. Saving them would indicate a willingness to share the planet and its resources with another large predator, something most humans have seemed unwilling or unable to do.
In fact, the most common models for living with large carnivores involve separating them from people either by confining them to protected areas whose boundaries are maintained artificially by relocating or killing wanderers or by constructing actual barriers, like fences. Neither approach has been entirely successful, not least because the species involved have refused to recognize the prescribed boundaries. More important, human population growth and the subsequent lust for land and resources show no signs of abating, leaving little for non-human predators.
That “separation model” grows out of the American habit, which lies at the root of the preservation movement of the 19th century and of the environmental movement of the late 20th century of cleaving humans from nature. It assumes that people and large carnivores cannot get along; moreover, the argument carries over to the more general question of whether humans should in the name of ‘biodiversity’ or some other overarching principle seek to preserve stretches of land from human activity or should certain human uses be allowed.