Students and researchers gathered at the Terasaki Life Sciences Building to attend a wild animal welfare science seminar March 7.
Researchers presented animal welfare case studies, challenges in measuring welfare and future directions for the field at the event. Wild animal welfare science studies the subjective experiences of wild animals and their quality of life, said Dave Daversa, a lecturer in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Daversa, a project scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, discussed his research on biological metrics as indicators of chronic stress in toads at the seminar. One major challenge in animal welfare science is understanding animal experiences because it is difficult to get inside the heads of non-human animals, he said.
Bradley Shaffer, a distinguished professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology and institute of the environment and sustainability, said the seminar was meant to get people thinking about applications of welfare in animals beyond that of pets.
“Wild animals that are always living in a fearful state for whatever reason have reduced welfare, and that presumably has consequences,” he said.
There is a big disconnect between pet welfare and wild animal welfare, Shaffer said. Since many people care about the welfare of their pets, this idea just needs to be transferred from a dog, cat or parakeet to wild animals such as squirrels and pigeons, he added.
Janire Castellano Bueno, a postdoctoral research associate at Newcastle University, discussed welfare indicators and integrating welfare into behavioral research at the event.
Behavior, vocalizations, posture, temperature, body composition and hormone measures are some of the methods researchers use to assess the welfare of wild animals, she said, adding that one aim of this research is to inform wildlife conservation interventions and improve health outcomes.
However, there’s no standard indicator of welfare that works for all species, so we don’t know what the welfare states are for many of them, Castellano Bueno said.
Andrew Sharo, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher who studies welfare biomarkers in amphibians and fishes, said while we know a lot about these markers in mammals due to their ubiquity in labs and farms, other species remain under-researched.
“To do that intervention and know if it was successful, you need to be able to measure welfare before and after,” Sharo said on the panel.
Some factors in determining effective welfare markers include accuracy and the feasibility of applying them in the field, Sharo said.
An important consideration for welfare when working in a conservation is the impact of humans, said Erika Ono-Kerns, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.
“I think especially in cases where it (suffering) is human caused, there is a type of duty to prevent further suffering,” she said .
Shaffer also said even though the two fields – conservation and animal welfare science – are separate, welfare science might help explain why a species is declining from a conservation perspective.
It’s important to ensure that animals under our care and in captivity have good welfare because we are constantly impacting their lives, either directly or indirectly, and we have no idea what that impact is, Castellano Bueno said.
There is a lot cities can do to protect their local wildlife and also conserve it, Ono-Kerns said, adding that consideration of interactions with humans is important for disease spillover prevention.
Anytime work on animals is done, there is also the potential to cause temporary distress, but working with experts, such as veterinarians, can help with developing study protocols that are minimally distressful, Daversa said.
Even if students in research are uninterested in the ethical or legal framework of animal welfare, their study results may be impacted because an animal’s psychological state influences behavior and the amount of resources obtained, Castellano Bueno said.
“There’s an imperative to learn how we can also respect them, and be stewards to the animals we use to gain new scientific insights,” said Daversa. “Wild animal welfare science is really working at the frontier of what we know about the lives of wild animals and so by prioritizing this research area we will generate new knowledge that we can apply.”