Post provided by Michaël Beaulieu

A cold Encounter in the Wild

When talking about animal welfare to scientists who commonly use biologging tools to monitor the behaviour or physiology of wild animals in an ecological or conservation context, I have noticed that the first thing that usually comes to mind for them is the unwanted impact that biologging may have on animal welfare. Much has indeed been discussed and written in the last two decades about the side effects of biologging that may worsen the welfare of the studied animals. So, naturally, these effects can no longer be ignored by the biologging community. For instance, capture, which typically precedes the equipment of animals with dataloggers, might be perceived as a traumatic experience by most animals that have evolved in the wild to avoid predators, including human investigators. Similarly, when electronic devices are too heavy, bulky, or not streamlined enough, they may reduce the ability of animals to move freely in their natural environment, which in turn may impair their welfare by reducing their ability to find food and avoid predators efficiently.

A possible Relationship

Because of the potential side effects of biologging on welfare, it might be considered paradoxical (or worse, unethical) to encourage wildlife biologists to use this methodology to directly assess the welfare of animals in their natural environment. Yet, this is exactly what I do in my article recently published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution and written in collaboration with Michaela Masilkova, a post-doctoral researcher at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. I decided to put forward this provocative idea, as the emerging field of wild animal welfare science is in dire need of methodological tools allowing scientists to examine how animals experience their lives in their natural environment. This is an important question, on which I have been focusing over the last two years as a scientist working for the young non-profit organization Wild Animal Initiative. Finding the right tools to study the wild animal welfare could, indeed, significantly advance our broad understanding of how animals generally experience their lives, since individuals of a given species may experience their lives in unique ways. Because biologging is primarily applied in the wild to measure variables that could be interpreted in terms of welfare (e.g., movements, postures, heart rate), this methodology could be a promising tool paving the way for the study of wild animal welfare, but only if its advantages overcome its costs.

A realistic Marriage

To obtain the most objective view of the value of biologging for examining wild animal welfare, Michaela and I evaluated this methodology against the theoretical criteria that are currently recommended to generally assess animal welfare in terms of feasibility, correctness, and usefulness. We found that the limitations of biologging for assessing wild animal welfare were not only related to the disturbance that this methodological approach may generate for the studied animals, but also to the validity and the representativeness of the collected data as welfare indicators. These limitations may at least partly explain the results of a literature review conducted in a parallel study showing that (1) animal welfare is rarely explicitly assessed in biologging studies, and (2) animal welfare studies rarely use biologging approaches to assess welfare. However, these limitations appear to be (at least partly) surmountable due to the progress that has recently been made to reduce the disturbance related to biologging approaches (e.g., equipping animals with dataloggers without capture, miniaturizing devices, accessing biologging data without (re)capture), and to the theoretical frameworks that have been proposed to validate behavioural or physiological markers as welfare indicators (for which implementation could be facilitated using biologging). Moreover, these limitations are likely to be counterbalanced by the important advantages that biologging offers in the wild by increasing the feasibility, informativeness, and completeness of welfare assessments conducted on free-ranging animals experiencing ever-changing conditions.

An expected prolific Marriage

Based on this objective evaluation, I believe that biologging represents a promising methodological avenue for the study of wild animal welfare. However, I also think that future studies assessing the welfare of wild animals using biologging approaches will be impactful for the whole field of animal welfare only (1) if they use the same language and perspectives as those currently used by animal welfare biologists, and (2) if they consider a variety of animal species beyond mammals and birds. Our recent article, therefore, calls for more collaborations between the biologging and the animal welfare fields, if this marriage is to be a successful one.

Post edited by Lydia Morley