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This is a crosspost for Research round-up: 2024 by Wild Animal Initiative, which was originally published on their blog on 29 January 2025.
January 29, 2025
Since the launch of our Grants Program in 2021, Wild Animal Initiative’s work to fund and collaborate with scientists has helped us identify the areas where publishing our own work can best supplement the field of wild animal welfare science. Thanks to this knowledge, our Research Team’s output has been increasingly proliferative. At the same time, our grantees are beginning to publish the results of their multi-year projects. The result is that our researchers and grantees together published more papers in 2024 than in the previous five years combined.
Publishing research papers is key to contributing new knowledge to the field, and to forming connections with the broader scientific community through collaborations and conference presentations.
We’re proud of the impacts our research seems to have had on the scientific community so far, and we expect this trend to continue as more of our grantees publish, and as our Research Program accelerates.
Our key considerations when selecting research topics are which areas have the biggest potential to fill key knowledge gaps, which areas are most neglected, and which topics our research team is particularly well-equipped to work on. Some of our current priorities are removing roadblocks to measuring welfare, helping identify research areas that could result in interventions relatively soon, and building connections with disciplines whose experts may not realize how much their work overlaps with wild animal welfare. You’ll see these themes reflected in the topics below, which include connections between welfare and cognitive research, identifying new ways to measure welfare, and fertility control.
Papers published by the Wild Animal Initiative Research Team in 2024
Taking welfare into account in comparative cognition research
Luigi Baciadonna, Janire Castellano Bueno, Vittoria Elliott, Christian Nawroth
Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2024
Comparative cognition researchers typically study animals in captivity, where poor environmental conditions and unmet welfare requirements can negatively impact animals’ welfare and cognition over their lifetimes. This can inhibit them from performing as well on cognitive tasks as members of their species otherwise would be capable of. In this paper, Baciadonna et al. argue that designing comparative cognition research with welfare in mind is therefore vital — because meeting welfare requirements improves the experience of the animals being studied, and because it improves research quality.
Oxidative status: A general but overlooked indicator of welfare across animal species?
Bioessays, August 2024
Markers of oxidative stress — an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants in the body — are present in all sentient animals and are directly connected to the nervous system. This makes them great candidates for welfare indicators, but researchers have so far made little use of them. This paper explores how markers of oxidative stress can be used to assess the welfare of wild animals. It’s also a demonstration of how physiological and behavioral markers can be validated using existing research, rather than conducting new empirical studies that might subject animals to potentially distressing experiments.
Improving wild animal welfare through contraception
Simon Eckerström Liedholm, Luke Hecht, Vittoria Elliott
BioScience, October 2024
Most research on wildlife contraceptives has explored potential harms they may pose, but contraceptives actually have the potential to benefit wild animal welfare by reducing population density. High population densities can cause depleted resources or increased disease risk, which in turn can mean higher stress, lower body condition, and lower survival. In this paper, Eckerström Liedholm et al. demonstrate that under the right circumstances, targeted lowering of the reproductive rate could alleviate resource scarcity, leading to higher survival rates, improved body condition, and better welfare.
Plugging biologging into animal welfare: An opportunity for advancing wild animal welfare science
Methods in Ecology and Evolution, December 2024
Biologging involves attaching electronic tags to animals to monitor physiological and behavioral markers, as well as the environmental conditions encountered by free-ranging animals in their natural habitat. Because most biologging variables may reflect animals’ welfare, biologging has been recommended to assist researchers in describing captive animals’ affective states — but distinct limitations may prevent extending this methodology to animals in the wild. This paper discusses how to overcome these challenges, indicating a path forward for the use of biologging in wild animal welfare science.
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Papers published by Wild Animal Initiative grantees in 2024
A novel method to measure the impact of water quality on judgement bias in wild juvenile fish
Rafael Freire, Christine Nicol
Global Ecology and Conservation, October 2024
Judgment bias tests are frequently used in animal welfare research. By measuring whether animals respond optimistically or pessimistically to various stimuli, researchers can infer something about their emotional states. The method typically involves training that requires animals under study to be kept in captivity, but in this paper, Freire and Nicol propose a novel method to measure cognitive bias in populations of free-living wild fish. Using this method — which can now be replicated by future researchers — produced evidence that aspects of water quality may lead to a negative bias in juvenile Murray cod.
Harnessing the gut microbiome: A potential biomarker for wild animal welfare
Sam Sonnega, Michael Sheriff
Frontiers in Veterinary Science, October 2024
Just like in humans, aspects of the gut microbiome and its interaction with the host may serve as a reflection of an animal’s health, stress levels, and emotional states. The gut microbiome is part of the causal chain linking an animal’s brain to their fecal metabolites, which are often analyzed as a time-integrated record of physiological stress. In this paper, Sonnega and Sheriff demonstrate that this makes the microbiome a potentially useful biomarker for wild animal welfare. Measuring gut microbiome composition is also non-invasive, since fecal samples can be taken non-invasively in the wild.
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Executive summary: In 2024, Wild Animal Initiative and its grantees significantly expanded the body of peer-reviewed research on wild animal welfare, with a focus on improving welfare measurement tools, identifying potential interventions like fertility control, and strengthening interdisciplinary connections—demonstrating both growing momentum in the field and a strategic effort to fill critical knowledge gaps.
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