September 22, 2023

Michaël Beaulieu, a Physiology Researcher at Wild Animal Initiative, wrote a paper about the complicated relationship between physiology and welfare that was published online in Biological Reviews. The article advances this important research area by highlighting the central relationship between physiology and animal welfare, rectifying its oversight in the current scientific literature on wild animals. Moreover, the article emphasizes the advantages of including physiological markers to assess animal welfare in the wild, as well as their concomitant limitations.

Michaël’s paper is more than a classical review; it also offers a general reflection on the use of physiological tools to assess wild animal welfare across animal taxa. As you’ll read in this paper, mentions of welfare have been extremely rare in ecophysiology and conservation physiology literature. But with new literature like Michaël’s, we hope to see welfare becoming more prevalent as a research topic.

You can read the full paper here (open access), or you can read a summary of the paper that highlights its key conclusions in our library.