All of Animal_Ethics's Comments + Replies

In case it's useful: Wild animal suffering video course

Hi, yes there is a difference between creating new frameworks, and just adopting frameworks to different species in parallel. You probably have in mind the establishment of welfare biology as a new field. What happens in that case is that the study of the circumstances affecting the welfare of wild animals requires learning many things about their environment, due to which cross-disciplinary work intersecting animal welfare science and ecology is needed, which is not the case with domesticated animals.

You're probably right with regards to sources of fundin... (read more)

Great questions! The cost of eDNA sampling will depend on the situation and environment to some extent. Its use in water is quite well developed. There is where we currently see the most research and cost comparisons. For instance, from 2017 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03632415.2017.1276329) "the total effort expended to analyze 36 eDNA samples was approximately 6.8 person-hours. At an hourly pay rate of $22.51/h, the labor cost associated with analyzing our samples was $153. Cost of screening the samples with ddPCR was $4.02 per sample (N... (read more)

Thank you very much, Saulius and Will, for your interesting comments, and sorry we didn’t reply straight away as these are very busy weeks for us!

In your comments you raised a point that is unrelated to the content of this post but it’s definitely interesting to address. Among the reasons you mention for signing our publications as individuals, there are some that point to advantages of doing so that, we agree, are undeniable. But there are other reasons in favor of not doing that that we consider more important, so we sign our publications ... (read more)

Thank you for your excellent comment, Gavin! You highlight several important points, with which we agree. Concerning why viruses in general, and coronaviruses in particular, are so prevalent in bats, you're quite right, although on top of what you said there are other factors that can be considered too, which is why we argued that it could be a sum of "high genetic diversity (there are both many species and many individual  bats), [and that bats are] long-lived, and they roost in large groups." 

Thank you! Your points are very good ones.

Like you pointed out, many diseases that can be very virulent in humans (Ebola, Nipah, Coronavirus) are not so virulent in bats, so there would be many instances where a vaccination program will be very valuable for humans but have very little (and maybe even negative, due to side effects) effect on the wild animal population.

Yes, this is true to some extent, although it's likely that even if viruses that are virulent in other animals are less so in bats, they are nevertheless, if to a minor extent, harmful fo... (read more)

Hi ælijah, thanks!

Those questions are interesting, but the reason why we didn't ask them is that we carried out this study in order to learn what kind of research it would be better to promote in academia to help to establish work on wild animal suffering/welfare biology as successfully as possible. Due to this, we chose the scenarios that we expected to be more promising (based on our study of the literature, but especially on the results of this other study).

Yes, the survey was anonymous. At any rate, at this point we know of scholars who could carry out work on fields related to helping wild animals (right now we're funding welfare biology research in Canada, New Zealand, and Spain). The main constraint to getting work done is funding.

If you know of specific, comparable examples and are able to share their names/citations...

These are some examples, though it’s anecdotal evidence. It's also hard to say to what extent they are relevantly comparable:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177... (read more)

Hi Jamie, thank you!

We did consider asking academics about that, but we finally decided against it as that could have distorted the results of the survey, and our primary goal here was to get the information we were looking for.

We have a similar opinion about the response rate. We were expecting it to be quite low, though not that much (we had initially planned to send 2,000-2,500 emails, and ended up sending almost 4,000). Other surveys among scientists do get much higher response rates, although they can vary a lot.