Increasing the Awareness of Animal Welfare Science in Marine Mammal Conservation: Addressing Language, Translation and Reception Issues

Abstract

Integrating welfare principles into conservation strategy is an emerging synthesis that encourages consideration of individual animals’ quality of life in research, policies and law. However, these principles have gained limited traction in marine compared to terrestrial animal conservation. This manuscript investigates several factors that may be contributing to this disparity. In order to gauge current understanding of animal welfare science principles by marine mammal researchers and other stakeholders, a “Welfare in the Wild” workshop was convened at the 32nd European Cetacean Society conference (La Spezia, Italy, April 2018). The workshop was attended by 30 participants who completed pre- and post-workshop surveys on animal welfare principles. The survey results highlight a range of different views about exactly what animal welfare science is and how it can be applied to marine mammals. Specifically, participants’ definitions appeared to vary depending on the type of employment or research they engaged in, indicating a need for an interdisciplinary common language. Secondly, we analysed the peer-reviewed literature in order to ascertain where marine mammal publications exploring welfare were being published. From 1950 to July 2020, a total of 299 articles featured both marine mammal taxa (one or more) and the word welfare in the title, abstract or keywords. This represents just 0.96% of the total peer-reviewed published papers on marine mammal taxa (n = 31,221) during the same period. When examining articles published within “Welfare and Ethics” (n = 6133) and “Aquatic-focused” (n = 139,352) journals, just 1.2% (n = 71) and 0.04% (n = 57) of articles, respectively, featured the word welfare when examining marine mammals. With the aim of exploring how explicitly including welfare evaluations in marine mammal research and management can benefit conservation outcomes, we framed our workshop and quantitative literature review findings to provide practical solutions to the language, translation and reception issues of this burgeoning cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Evaluating Potential Cetacean Welfare Indicators from Video of Live Stranded Long-Finned Pilot Whales (Globicephala melas edwardii)

“…Although the need to assess wild animal welfare has been highlighted [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ], there are limited systematic, scientific protocols for such assessments [ 10 ]. Furthermore, detailed behavioural and physiological data from species in the wild are often lacking [ 11 ], hindering the development of welfare assessments for wild populations [ 12 ].…”

“…In the context of free-swimming cetaceans, data on stress hormones [ 17 , 18 , 19 ], body condition [ 20 , 21 , 22 ], skin disease [ 23 , 24 , 25 ], and the impacts of anthropogenic activities on behaviour [ 26 , 27 , 28 ] have been collected. However, few studies interpret their findings in terms of welfare or discuss possible welfare implications [ 9 ]. During live strandings, cetaceans are subject to both natural [ 29 , 30 ] and anthropogenic stressors [ 31 ] that may affect their welfare and survival likelihood [ 32 ].…”

Identification of potential welfare and survival indicators for stranded cetaceans through international, interdisciplinary expert opinion

“…According to contemporary concepts of animal welfare, including those generated by this group of experts [ 17 ], ‘fitness’ should be understood in terms of how it relates to impacts upon the animal's affective state. Therefore, the potential affective experiences of cetaceans must be considered from objective assessment of a range of indicators, to ensure that holistic approaches to welfare and survival are integrated in the decision-making process [ 1 , 2 ] considering both during and post stranding.…”

“…There is increasing recognition that animal welfare science must be integrated alongside conservation biology to achieve wildlife management goals [1][2][3][4]. While conservation efforts involving human intervention often claim to consider animal welfare, robust welfare assessments are rarely undertaken [5][6][7][8][9].…”

Expert assessment of the impact of ship-strikes on cetacean welfare using the Welfare Assessment Tool for Wild Cetaceans

“…The knowledge gap between 'welfare' and 'cetacean' experts would be better bridged in this way and views on the cases shared to come to the most informed conclusion. Since animal welfare is a multi-disciplinary science (Dawkins 2008;Clegg & Butterworth 2017;Dolman et al 2020;Nicol et al 2020;Clegg et al 2021), the sharing of expertise would be very useful. Expert scores could be assessed again after the post-survey discussion to assess whether the sharing of expertise had influenced their scoring.…”