The SAFE North American Monarch Program addresses the challenges of Habitat Loss, Pesticide Use, and Climate Change. The program seeks to enable institutions to participate within their scope by providing Organizational Activities to meet the strategic objectives of the SAFE Monarch Program. Each activity provides actionable items and ideas to help every partner bolster their conservation work, community engagement, and on-site programming. 

The SAFE North American Monarch Program does not consider the rearing or breeding of monarchs as an effective conservation strategy. While captive rearing has been successful in laboratory settings for other at-risk species, this approach is not yet warranted for monarchs and may cause more harm than good. We do recognize that this can be a controversial topic as there is mounting research that suggests that rearing and/or breeding monarchs can be detrimental to the population as a whole with effects on fitness, migration success, and the increased risk of disease. 

We look to many of our external partners for their expertise and considerations on this action and advise following their recommendations especially in discussion with visitors and the public. 

If rearing, please be sure to adhere to protocols set up in the following community sciences programs in order to reduce the risks of disease spread, and always contribute your observations to an established community science program:

Monarch Larva Monitoring Project or Project Monarch Health

Please note, at this time it is illegal to rear OR handle monarchs in the state of California without a permit.

Research on rearing as well as other topics relative to monarchs has been summarized each year in research reviews hosted by the Monarch Joint Venture. For papers relevant to this topic, review the sections and summary of citations. Please reach out to safemonarch@monarchjointventure.org for any additional questions or access to specific papers.