Death in the wild: A guest post from Faunalytics
The mission of Faunalytics, an Animal Charity Evaluators 2021 Top Charity, is to empower animal advocates with access to research, analysis, strategies, and messages that maximize their effectiveness to reduce animal suffering. This post was contributed by Karol Orzechowski, Content Director for Faunalytics.
January 13, 2022
Faunalytics is an organization that largely focuses our work on the plight of farmed animals, but in the past few years, we’ve been increasingly keeping our eyes on the field of research into wild animal welfare and related topics.
An important focus of wild animal welfare research is gaining a better understanding of the welfare and living conditions of wild animals, as well as how they die, and how those deaths may be preventable within particular boundaries. This is done with the goal of identifying the most high-impact areas where we can make positive interventions. Studying cause of death for wild animals is a key interest because of how it relates to suffering — not all deaths are equal, and if we’re able to identify the most painful and prevalent causes of death for different species, we may be able to help mitigate suffering on a very large scale.
WAI has written about the importance of studying cause of death, as well as the methods by which animal advocates might do so. Below, we highlight a handful of resources in the Faunalytics Research Library that can contribute to this research area.
Intervening for animals after wildfire
Wildfires are, unfortunately, very instructive in showing the complexity of causes of death in the wild. Wildfires can kill animals in numerous ways, from acute heat and burn deaths, to deaths from asphyxiation, to more long-term mortality from habitat loss and modification. This range of potential causes of death makes both wildfire prevention and subsequent rescue efforts a very complex task. The study summarized here gives some practical advice for wild animal rescuers, in terms of what can be done in the immediate aftermath of these events. The study also identifies areas where we could benefit from more knowledge, including the specific impacts of fire on pollinators, aquatic animals, and predator species, as would studies on the effects of post-fire activities such as logging.
Using buoys to keep seabirds from becoming bycatch
Bycatch is responsible for the deaths of billions of individual animals worldwide, including fish, marine mammals, and seabirds, and by some estimates accounts for more than 10% of the annual total weight caught in fisheries globally. Animals caught as bycatch may die quickly, but they may also be injured in various ways during the process, becoming tangled in gear and struggling frantically to escape. For seabirds, who are caught in nets and lines while hunting for fish, their deaths may be particularly troubling, as they are tangled or hooked, dragged under, and drowned. This study from our library specifically looks at ways of mitigating the bycatch of seabirds in gillnets. While the number of animals that could be affected by interventions in this area is relatively low (approximately 400,000 annually), the study and potential intervention itself is worth noting, as it identifies a particularly pernicious cause of death and offers hope for change.
Responding to predators
Perhaps the most common way that we think of wild animals suffering and dying is from predation. Of course, predator-prey relations exist in every healthy ecosystem, and these are natural phenomena. The question of whether humans should intervene in nature to reduce predation or suffering in wild animal death is a complex and controversial one — mitigating deaths by predation can subsequently lead to the suffering of predators through starvation, and so on. This study looks at how humans may contribute to deaths by predation by desensitizing some wild animals to predator contact. It finds that even minimal contact with humans can begin the process of desensitization for animals of some species, making them more susceptible to predation in the long term. More tangentially, this study (and others) show that humans are already affecting predator-prey relationships in the wild. While many may rightly bristle at the idea of mitigating predation as a broad intervention (which could have many unintended effects), it is important to remember that we are already intervening in the wild through a variety of intentional and accidental ways. We should be more intentional about how we interact with the ecosystems we share, and do what we can to positively affect the lives of other animals.
These are just a few recent studies that directly or indirectly address cause of death for wild animals and take the immense suffering that they may face seriously. As the field of wild animal welfare grows, develops, and gains support, we at Faunalytics will continue to share research that highlights the importance of mitigating wild animal suffering wherever possible, and helps contribute to our knowledge of the field more generally.
