Improving the measurement of animal welfare
Developing ageing biomarkers as a measure of animal welfare
This profile is tailored towards students studying biological sciences, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Improving wild animal welfare could be a particularly effective way to improve the world. Although there is a lot of uncertainty about the number of wild animals in existence, estimates suggest this number is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of humans.
Wild animals seem to experience many severe hardships in nature – such as disease, starvation, predation and parasitism – but research into the welfare of wild animals is highly neglected. Although there are ways of improving wild animal welfare that seem promising, work in this area is impeded by the difficulty of actually measuring and comparing the quality of animals’ lives.
One particularly promising new approach to measuring animal wellbeing is to compare the rate of biological ageing in different populations, with faster-ageing animals taken to be experiencing worse welfare. If developed properly, ageing-based methods could improve researchers’ ability to evaluate and compare the quality of life of different animal groups, allowing resources intended to improve animal welfare to be used much more effectively.
In this video, Will Bradshaw, a research fellow at Wild Animal Initiative, outlines the potential of biological ageing as a measure of animal welfare, as well as some of its possible limitations.
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Individuals: Melissa Bateson and Colline Poirier are two of the academics who have done work specifically on ageing biomarkers as a way of measuring animal welfare. For a longer list of academics who have done research on wild animal welfare in general, see this list.
Organizations: The Wild Animal Initiative supports researchers studying many aspects of wild animal welfare.
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Contributors: This profile was last updated 22/05/22. Thanks to William Bradshaw for originally creating this profile. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
