Assessing Animal Welfare with Behavior: Onward with Caution

Abstract

An emphasis on ensuring animal welfare is growing in zoo and aquarium associations around the globe. This has led to a focus on measures of welfare outcomes for individual animals. Observations and interpretations of behavior are the most widely used outcome-based measures of animal welfare. They commonly serve as a diagnostic tool from which practitioners make animal welfare decisions and suggest treatments, yet errors in data collection and interpretation can lead to the potential for misdiagnosis. We describe the perils of incorrect welfare diagnoses and common mistakes in applying behavior-based tools. The missteps that can be made in behavioral assessment include mismatches between definitions of animal welfare and collected data, lack of alternative explanations, faulty logic, behavior interpreted out of context, murky assumptions, lack of behavior definitions, and poor justification for assigning a welfare value to a specific behavior. Misdiagnosing the welfare state of an animal has negative consequences. These include continued poor welfare states, inappropriate use of resources, lack of understanding of welfare mechanisms and the perpetuation of the previously mentioned faulty logic throughout the wider scientific community. We provide recommendations for assessing behavior-based welfare tools, and guidance for those developing tools and interpreting data.

Conducting Behavioural Research in the Zoo: A Guide to Ten Important Methods, Concepts and Theories

“…Measuring behaviour alongside assessment of the suitability, accessibility and ecological relevance of resources provides part of the information suitable for performing a welfare audit (i.e., scores of the quality of care provided based on evidence of husbandry and the animal's response to it) [75,93]. It is essential that appropriate behavioural measures are defined to ensure they are relevant to the species and situation under scrutiny, and more information on how to decide appropriate behavioural measures of zoo animal welfare is provided in Watters et al [94]. Figure 6 examines how the methods and theories explained in Sections 2.1-2.10 can be applied to welfare auditing and the collection of behavioural evidence to inform welfare-positive husbandry.…”

Effects of Visitor Presence and Crowd Size on Zoo-Housed Red Kangaroos (Macropus Rufus) During and After a COVID-19 Closure

“…Changes in activity budgets can be difficult to interpret and do not necessarily mean that animal welfare has changed (Watters et al, 2021). Increased social proximity could function as a form of vigilance behavior, but the relationship between vigilance and animal welfare can be ambiguous.…”

Welfare Assessment Tools in Zoos: From Theory to Practice

“…However, many of these have not been characterized in zoo species. Moreover, ideally there should be empirical evidence that the behavior relates to the affective valence of the animal, and the direction of that affect [22]. In the absence of this direct evidence, those creating assessment tools should consider how they can demonstrate the link between the behavior and affect by inductive reasoning [22].…”

“…Furthermore, when behavior monitoring is incorporated into an assessment tool, the behavior should be fully defined, including the context in which it may be seen. A behavior that may occur in different contexts may then legitimately be included in different functional categories [22].…”

“…The Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index (H-index) is perhaps the most used measure of diversity and provides an indication of whether an animal's time budget is mostly made up of a few behaviors or covers a range of behavioral categories [43]. The model closely aligns with the natural living model of welfare, in that animals in the wild display considerable behavioral diversity and hence good welfare in captivity would be assumed if animals showed similarly diverse behaviors [22]. Although, there are differences; using diversity indexes requires counting of individual behaviors whereas natural living compares behaviors that are similar between wild and captive counterparts.…”