In the US, a lot of wildlife conservation work involves trapping and tagging wild animals. I listen to a popular hunting podcast where wildlife biologists are

In the US, a lot of wildlife conservation work involves trapping and tagging wild animals. I listen to a popular hunting podcast where wildlife biologists are often brought on as guests, and a LOT of the information they get seems to be directly from GPS collars. Science is the primary and proper tool for wildlife management policy under the North American Model of conservation, and GPS collars are the primary way of tracking things like mortality, migration, etc. that inform such science. The main thing to remember is that, practically speaking, conservation is about a population, not the individuals within the population. The point isn't to save the individual deer, rather the point is to make sure that 100 years from now, deer are still around. This is how things like the the Pittman-Robertson Act are justified -- funding wildlife conservation from tag/license sales to hunters to kill wildlife. The results (the foundation of arguably the most successful wildlife restoration programs in human history, responsible for bringing dozens of major species back from near-extinction) speak for themselves.