Plugging biologging into animal welfare: An opportunity for advancing wild animal welfare science

Abstract

Animal welfare science is currently expanding beyond its traditional boundaries, from captive animals to those living in the wild. This current development is conceptually and methodologically challenging, but it could benefit from adjacent and more established research fields. Among these fields, biologging appears to be a strong candidate, as most intrinsic, location and environmental variables collected through biologging approaches could be used to assess animal welfare in the wild. To provide an objective view of the suitability of biologging to assess wild animal welfare, biologging was evaluated against the criteria that are currently recommended to assess animal welfare. This evaluation shows that biologging approaches could enhance animal welfare assessments in terms of completeness, informativeness and feasibility in the wild. However, their full implementation may be complicated by limitations in terms of validity, representativeness and disturbance, and by the different welfare perspectives taken by wildlife biologists using biologging approaches and animal welfare biologists. To exploit the full potential that biologging approaches could offer to assess wild animal welfare, their current limitations need to be overcome. Towards this end, recommendations are explicitly provided to enhance the validity and the representativeness of biologging measurements as welfare indicators, while reducing disturbance. To increase the visibility and the impact of biologging studies examining wild animal welfare, we also encourage wildlife biologists using biologging approaches to adopt the same language and perspectives as those used by animal welfare biologists. If current limitations are overcome, biologging is likely to be instrumental for the future study of animal welfare in the wild. Reciprocally, integrating animal welfare in biologging studies is expected to have a great impact on the whole biologging field by extending its current scope to a new and promising research area.