If domestication of native animals can help reduce pressure on ecosystems (e.g. reduce poaching by having a legal and controlled farming and trade of a certain species) then domestication may be beneficial.

On the other hand, domestication of an introduced species can lead to it increasing its range (e.g. via escapes or intentional release) and thus have an impact on ecosystems which had until then not been affected by the said species.

First of all you should make sure you distinguish between domestication and taming. Domestication is when humans through selective breeding transform an animal or plant species into something useful for humans while taming involves usually a single or few individuals of an animal species taken in by humans and carefully nurtured so that they can co-exist in human communities. However a single taming will not make a whole species domesticated.

In light of this, domestication has been beneficial in an ecological context as it has provided a sustainable food source to the growing human population over the past centuries. An example of useful domestication is cattle rared by Maasai pastoralists who would otherwise rely on hunting in the wild as a source of food. So domestication of wild animals can be useful as it takes off the pressure from wild and novel habitats especially in the long run.

However, it should be enough for humans to maintain and improve the current domestications especially with regard to animals, instead of going out into the wild to tame news species. Taming has been a source of major ecological problems such as animal trafficking which is threatening wild populations.

There is also an issue of spread of pathogens  from wild species to humans resulting into epidemics such as measles and tuberculosis from diseases of cattle, influenza from a disease of  some avian species and pigs and more recently Ebola & Anthrax from primates and other wild animals. The genesis of these epidemics can easily be  traced to domestication or taming. Since it has happened to humans, increased taming and domestication may also result into an  increase in transmissions especially between wild species which is a minus in an ecological context.

There is also an issue of increased invasive alien species which are threatening many novel habitats. Pathways of invasion can easily be traced to human  trans-locations and introductions of alien species into new geographical ranges in an attempt to domesticate or tame them. Though i can't personally give examples of animals that have become invasive through this there are examples of  many ornamental plants for example Eichhornia crassipes, Impatiens glandulifera, etc that were introduced as garden plants but escaped into the wild.

Here is an article i found interesting about the issue:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11218799_Evolution_consequences_and_future_of_plant_and_animal_domestication

Best regards

Article Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication

But how about wild animals which are being captured and fenced for reproduction? Those animals which reproduced slowly (e.g wild deer). Is this still within the context of wildlife management? For some reason, maybe, but how about allowing them to reproduce in their natural habitat?

There is a huge literature on fish hatcheries that is relevant to your question.  In a hatchery, people pair parents and then rear offspring in an artificial environment.  Thus, the genetic composition of hatchery-reared fish differs from the wild-born counterparts.  Concern for the wild population comes when the hatchery-reared fish breed with wild fish.  See Ford's 2002 paper in Conservation Biology for the quantitative genetics of "supportive breeding" programs.  See Christie, Ford, and Blouin (2014) paper in Evolutionary Applications for an overview of the hatchery concern.  Blouin and Christie have other good empirical genetics papers on this. 

It is an approach to conserve animal biodiversity

G'day all,

I need to take 5 to understand what is being proposed by this question. Are we talking about captive breeding programs, and subsequent reintroductions here? Or are we talking domestication for human use? Or are we somehow talking about taming for a pet trade to increase community awareness? It's important to be clear on this, because the answers in this thread touch on all of those, and they're all very different.

As for my (questionably useful) opinions, here goes:

1) taming or domestication for the pet trade is not valuable for conservation. People don't really seem to learn anything about the conservation value of the fauna, it just becomes another wacky pet. Furthermore, unless there is some seriously heavy duty legislation and policing, it opens wild populations up to harvesting. I haven't actually read anything published about this, but I'm sure it has been. I'm going on anecdotal evidence of the reptile pet trade in Australia. Things there were a bit dodgey for a while;

2) Domestication for human uses has been very well explored here by Nelson Mujuni. Again, it's not really a conservation action, exactly. In addition to all of Nelson's comments about invasive species risk, disease and parasite vectors, etc, there is a chance of genetic pollution resulting. Domesticted cultivars do escape, with monotonous regularity, and regardless of whether they are cultivars of local taxa, or introduced species, they can hybridise with local endmeics, reducing their viability. Examples include the hybridisation of domestic Mallard Ducks with Australian native ducks, producing sterile hybrids and often also killing the females, and feral dogs hyrbidising with Dingos. Additionally, to explore the idea of cattle domestication reducing human impacts on the wild, I'd be curious about the ecological impacts of grazing on local habitats. It's becoming quite well established in Australia that rangelands grazing by cattle and goats reduces habitat quality and biodiversity.

3)The question that I think is being asked here is all about captive breeding for conservation outcomes. My feeling is that this is a lovely idea that has rarely been successful. As Matt Falcy pointed out, there are a number of papers describing the genetic effects of founders and proscribed breeding. There is similar discussion in the literature on seed storage and seed orcharding for species recovery. There is also a limited literature on the physiological effects of captive breeding essentially, within a very small period of time (1 generation according to Geiser and Ferguson), a number of physiological traits that are crucial to the survival of wild individuals are no longer in evidence in the captive-bred lines. Do they come back? Is this an epigenetic effect, or a phenotypic flexibility? I don't know, and I'm not sure that it's been explored, but natural selection would take a heavy toll on these animals in the wild. The final aspect to this hinges on the reintroduction of these individuals to wild populations. This is by no means straightforward, and again the literature is unclear on the ratio of success to failure, and on the causes of success and failure. Armstrong and Seddon (2008) and Fischer and Lindenmeyer explore these concepts extensively.

So, finally, yes, I think that captive breeding is an approach to conserve biodiversity, but it's of questionable success, both in the long and the short term. Here ends my rant