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Validating physiological markers as welfare indicators: the case of oxidative stress
Michaël Beaulieu
This research note is an extension of Physiology Researcher Michaël Beaulieu's paper, “Oxidative status: A general but overlooked indicator of welfare across animal species?,” which was published on June 4, 2024, in BioEssays’ “Problems & Paradigms” rubric.
Quantifying the neglectedness of wild animal welfare
Michaël Beaulieu
Physiology Researcher Michaël Beaulieu's deep dive examines the quality and quantity of mentions of wild animal welfare in the scientific literature and finds it to be a neglected research area.
Welfare and physiology: a complicated relationship
Michaël Beaulieu
This research note is an extension of Physiology Researcher Michaël Beaulieu's paper, Capturing wild animal welfare: a physiological perspective, which was published August 27, 2023, by Biological Reviews online.
Early-life experiences are a priority in wild animal welfare research
Luke Hecht
Hecht, L. (2021). The importance of considering age when quantifying wild animals’ welfare. Biological Reviews, 96(6), 2602-2616.
Wild animals experience different challenges and opportunities as they mature, and this variety of experiences can lead to different levels of welfare characterizing the day-to-day lives of individuals of different ages. At the same time, most wild animals who are born do not survive to adulthood. Individuals who die as juveniles do not simply experience a homogeneous fraction of the lifetimes of older members of their species; rather, their truncated lives may be characterized by very different levels of welfare. Here, I propose the concept of welfare expectancy as a framework for quantifying wild animal welfare at a population level, given individual-level data on average welfare with respect to age. This concept fits conveniently alongside methods of analysis already used in population ecology, such as demographic sensitivity analysis, and is applicable to evaluating the welfare consequences of human interventions and natural pressures that disproportionately affect individuals of different ages. In order to understand better and improve the state of wild animal welfare, more attention should be directed towards young animals and the particular challenges they face.
How wild animals die: what we know so far
Luke Hecht
In part three of this series, Luke Hecht gives an overview of what research in this field has taught us so far about how wild animals die and highlights gaps that seem especially important for welfare biology.
Methods for studying wild animals’ causes of death
Luke Hecht
In part two of this series, Luke Hecht introduces some of the tools and approaches used to study wild animals’ causes of death.
Reducing the burden of disease: the One Health approach
Jane Capozzelli
Jane Capozzelli reviews the One Health approach to public health and veterinary medicine and presents three contemporary research projects.
One Health is motivated by the maxim that the health and well-being of domestic animals, people, and wildlife are inextricably linked. Many projects focus on mitigating wildlife diseases in ways that help humans or livestock.
These projects can benefit the welfare of wild animals by improving the target animals’ health. To maximize wild animal welfare benefits, One Health projects should prioritize targeting common species and particularly prolonged or painful health issues.
Why cause of death matters for wild animal welfare
Luke Hecht
In part one of this series, Luke Hecht introduces approaches to studying wild animals’ causes of death, with the goal of making work in this field maximally useful for understanding wild animal welfare.
The relevance of trophic interactions to wild animal welfare
Luke Hecht
Luke Hecht explores the welfare implications of food chain length, biomass distribution, and predation.
Assessing biomarkers of aging as measures of cumulative animal welfare
Will Bradshaw
In order to determine which conditions provide the best overall quality of life for nonhuman animals, it is important to be able to measure their cumulative welfare experience. The ideal measure of cumulative welfare would be comprehensive, objectively measurable, and easy to transfer across species; however, existing approaches fall far short of this ideal. Recent academic work has suggested that measures of biological aging could provide a highly promising alternative measure of cumulative welfare, which comes much closer to meeting these ideal goals.
Here, Will Bradshaw reviews the existing empirical support for the use of biomarkers of aging as a measure of cumulative welfare, discusses the prerequisites of applying the method, and explores a number of important caveats that may limit its applicability. Many of these caveats are particularly applicable to the study of wild animal welfare, though some may also be important in domesticated contexts.