Evaluation of indicators of acute emotional states in dogs

A complete assessment of animal welfare requires not just an understanding of negative emotional states, such as fear and anxiety, but also of positive states, such as calmness and happiness. However, few studies have identified accurate and reliable indicators of positive emotional states in dogs. This study aimed to identify parameters that may serve as indicators of short-term emotional states in dogs. Using a cross-over design, 60 dogs living at a research facility were exposed to six different 10-min scenarios expected to elicit responses varying in emotional valence and arousal. A range of behavioural and physiological parameters were collected and their relationship to anticipated emotional valence and arousal was analysed using linear and logistic mixed models. Cortisol, adrenocorticotropic hormone, heart rate variability, panting, whining, and body shake all demonstrated significant differences based on arousal levels, but only within negative valence scenarios. Scores from a qualitative behavioural assessment (QBA) were associated with both emotional valence and arousal and were considered the best indicator of positive valence. Activity, ear temperature, and sitting were associated with positive high arousal, although this may have been influenced by differing levels of movement induced during these scenarios. Meanwhile, heart rate, secretory immunoglobulin A, standing and lying all showed similar changes associated with arousal for both positive and negative valence scenarios. This study provides a critical first step towards identifying evidence-based indicators of short-term emotional states in dogs, while highlighting considerations that should be made when employing these parameters, including the influence of coder bias, food provision, exercise, and external temperature. Overall, it is recommended future dog emotion and welfare research use a combination of parameters including indicators of both emotional valence and arousal.

Dolphin-WET-Development of a Welfare Evaluation Tool for Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) under Human Care

Ensuring high standards of animal welfare is not only an ethical duty for zoos and aquariums, but it is also essential to achieve their conservation, education, and research goals. While for some species, animal welfare assessment frameworks are already in place, little has been done for marine animals under human care. Responding to this demand, the welfare committee of the European Association for Aquatic Mammals (EAAM) set up a group of experts on welfare science, cetacean biology, and zoo animal medicine across Europe. Their objective was to develop a comprehensive tool to evaluate the welfare of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), named Dolphin-WET. The tool encompasses 49 indicators that were either validated through peer review or management-based expertise. The first of its kind, the Dolphin-WET is a species-specific welfare assessment tool that provides a holistic approach to evaluating dolphin welfare. Inspired by Mellor's Five Domains Model and the Welfare Quality®, its hierarchical structure allows for detailed assessments from overall welfare down to specific indicators. Through combining 37 animal-based and 12 resource-based indicators that are evaluated based on a two- or three-level scoring, the protocol offers a detailed evaluation of individual dolphins. This approach allows for regular internal monitoring and targeted welfare management, enabling caretakers to address specific welfare concerns effectively.

Reliability of caretakers' ratings of captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and finless porpoises' (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis sp.) behavioral style for welfare monitoring

Qualitative ratings are increasingly used to assess animal welfare. We investigated the associations between daily caretakers' ratings of individuals' behavioral style, behavior during free time, participation during training sessions, and environmental variables in captive Yangtze finless porpoises, East-Asian finless porpoises, and bottlenose dolphins. Associations between caretakers' ratings and behavior were found, including social swimming, fast swimming, play, interaction with humans, and agonistic and socio-sexual interactions. Ratings were also associated with participation during training sessions and food intake. Social separation, transport to a new pool, high visitors' density, and holding of a sick conspecific were associated with ratings indicating a deteriorated human-animal relationship, a lower interest/fear of the environment, and/or a higher social cohesion depending on the group. Through principal component analyses, new variables that represented both caretakers' ratings and behavior and that could be used for an easier interpretation of the data for welfare monitoring within each group were extracted. Caretaker ratings and behavior should be used as a complement to previously validated indicators to detect changes in welfare state and understand the potential causes of these changes.

The Power Is in the Word-Do Laypeople Interpret Descriptors of Dog Emotional States Correctly?

A basic understanding of dog behaviour and emotion is relevant not only for professionals, such as veterinary personnel or dog trainers, but also for dog owners and for people with little contact with dogs. Information about dog behaviour and emotions is mostly conveyed verbally. This study explores whether definitions of dog behaviour and emotion are understood in such a way that they can be allocated to a descriptor (i.e., a label such as "fearful"), even by people with low background knowledge. If people can match descriptors to definitions, this suggests that the definitions are distinct enough and elicit mental representations of behaviour that can fit the label. Good agreement on the definitions is a prerequisite for the validity of the descriptors used; however, no study to date has tested this. A sample of 236 adults was asked to match descriptors of Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA) for veterinary and shelter situations to their correct definitions, e.g., the descriptor "fearful" to its definition "dog may try to flee, hide or freeze; ears back". Matching was substantially above chance; nonetheless, the mean proportion of correct responses was only 50% (SD ± 16.6%) for the veterinary QBA set and 33% (SD ± 14.3%) for the shelter QBA set. Performance in the matching task was positively correlated with measures of experience with dogs. Taken together, the results suggest that descriptor-definition pairs used to describe dog behaviour need to be clearly defined to avoid misinterpretations when teaching laypeople how to interpret canine behaviour.

Acoustic Monitoring of Professionally Managed Marine Mammals for Health and Welfare Insights

Research evaluating marine mammal welfare and opportunities for advancements in the care of species housed in a professional facility have rapidly increased in the past decade. While topics, such as comfortable housing, adequate social opportunities, stimulating enrichment, and a high standard of medical care, have continued to receive attention from managers and scientists, there is a lack of established acoustic consideration for monitoring the welfare of these animals. Marine mammals rely on sound production and reception for navigation and communication. Regulations governing anthropogenic sound production in our oceans have been put in place by many countries around the world, largely based on the results of research with managed and trained animals, due to the potential negative impacts that unrestricted noise can have on marine mammals. However, there has not been an established best practice for the acoustic welfare monitoring of marine mammals in professional care. By monitoring animal hearing and vocal behavior, a more holistic view of animal welfare can be achieved through the early detection of anthropogenic sound sources, the acoustic behavior of the animals, and even the features of the calls. In this review, the practice of monitoring cetacean acoustic welfare through behavioral hearing tests and auditory evoked potentials (AEPs), passive acoustic monitoring, such as the Welfare Acoustic Monitoring System (WAMS), as well as ideas for using advanced technologies for utilizing vocal biomarkers of health are introduced and reviewed as opportunities for integration into marine mammal welfare plans.

A Quantitative Assessment of Trainers-Dolphins' Interactions in the Absence of Food Reward

All the studies that have considered the motivation of the dolphins to interact with their trainers as a possible welfare indicator have been carried out in facilities where the trainer-dolphin interactions (TDIs) sessions were reinforced with food. Therefore, in these specific circumstances, it was difficult to separate the motivation of the dolphins interacting with the trainers from the food drive. The current study aims to assess the interaction between the trainers and the dolphins in the absence of food rewards. The research was carried out at The Dolphin Reef (Eilat, Israel), a facility where the interaction between the trainers and 14 bottlenose dolphins of different sex and age classes did not involve food rewards. A total of 531 TDIs were recorded, with dolphins participating in 94.5% of the sessions and an average of three dolphins per session. The dolphins participated in a higher number and more frequently in the TDIs when toys were provided by the trainers. Diel and seasonal differences were also observed, with the dolphins participating more during the morning sessions and the neutral season. The latency of response of the dolphins to the presence of the trainers on the platform or in the water, whether or not advertised by the trainers' signal ("call" or "no-call"), was very short (usually less than 1 min), and the dolphins often anticipated the beginning of the sessions by arriving at the trainers' location before or upon the caretakers' arrival (96% of the time). Individual differences in the participation in the TDIs were also recorded, which might be linked to both the dolphin's health/welfare status or their personality. The current study shows that the separation of the TDIs from the food reward allows for a better understanding of the willingness of dolphins under human care to interact with their trainers. In addition, the results presented in this paper show that such TDIs are an important part of these dolphins' lives, which suggests that these interactions might be an additional tool to improve the animals' social environment and monitor their welfare.

Improving welfare assessment in aquaculture

While global aquaculture is rapidly expanding, there remains little attention given to the assessment of animal welfare within aquacultural systems. It is crucial that animal welfare concerns are central in the development and implementation of aquaculture as if they are not prioritized early on, it becomes much more difficult to adapt in future. To this end, it is important to ensure the availability of high-quality welfare assessment schemes to evaluate the welfare of animals in aquaculture and promote and maintain high welfare standards. This paper will first discuss some of the current certification and assessment frameworks, highlighting the primary limitations that need to be addressed, before going on to describe the recommendations for a best-practice welfare assessment process for aquaculture; with the hope that these considerations can be taken on board and used to help improve welfare assessment for aquaculture and, ultimately, to ensure animals used in aquaculture have a higher level of welfare. Any aquacultural system should be assessed according to a suitable framework in order to be considered adequate for the welfare of the animals it contains, and thus to maintain social license to operate.

Cognitive Foraging Enrichment (but Not Non-Cognitive Enrichment) Improved Several Longer-Term Welfare Indicators in Bottlenose Dolphins

Bottlenose dolphins are the most common cetacean kept globally in zoos and aquaria (hereafter zoos), and are gregarious animals with a mostly opportunistic, generalist feeding strategy in the wild. In zoos, they have limited to no opportunities to express natural foraging behaviours as they receive their daily food ration of dead fish in a series of training sessions. Enrichment provision has increased in recent years, but items are still predominantly simple and floating in nature, and do not always target the animals' problem-solving or food-acquisition behaviours. These discrepancies run concurrently with the intense debate about dolphin welfare in zoos and how to improve it. The current study used a within-subject design on 11 bottlenose dolphins at Kolmårdens Djurpark and measured how several welfare indicators differed between two treatments of "cognitive" and "non-cognitive" food-based enrichment. The treatments were provided on an alternating basis for eight consecutive weeks: during cognitive enrichment weeks, the animals received items which stimulated their problem-solving and foraging behaviours, and during non-cognitive enrichment weeks, they received simple items paired with fish (to eliminate bias due to food value). Data were taken related to several multidisciplinary welfare parameters during enrichment provision and training sessions, and to activity budget behaviours throughout the week. During the cognitive as opposed to non-cognitive enrichment weeks, the dolphins engaged more with the enrichment, were more motivated to participate in training sessions and performed less anticipatory and stereotypic behaviours, suggesting that cognitive enrichment improved several indicators of bottlenose dolphin welfare. Valuable lines of further investigation would be to understand how individual differences and different types of cognitive enrichment impact potential welfare benefits. Our results suggest that enrichment items promoting cognitive foraging behaviours may improve dolphin welfare, and therefore zoos might prioritise giving cognitive enrichment to this species as well as considering the same for other species with similar cognitive skills and foraging ecologies.

Behavior Skills Training with Zoological Staff to Increase Killer Whale Attending Behavior

Attending is a requisite behavior for interactions between animals in zoological care and their care specialist (trainers). Head-dropping behavior (HDB) is incompatible with attending and was observed with two killer whales during whale-trainer interactions (WTI). Initial observations also noted inconsistencies in the trainers' application of shaping procedures during WTI. A three-part plan was developed to address trainers procedural fidelity, increase whale attending during WTI, and program for the behavioral generalization and maintenance of the whale-trainer dyads (dyad). First, behavior skills training (BST) was used to instruct trainers on discrete trial training (DTT). Second, the trainers' applied their acquired skill of DTT, targeting attending behavior, with their whale during WTI. Third, behavioral generalization was programed by switching the dyad pairs in an additional DTT generalization phase. The findings demonstrated a strong positive correlation between trainer DTT fidelity and whale attending. Finally, the results suggest that future assessments of behavioral management programs with zoological trainers and animals are warranted.

Training as enrichment: A critical review

Husbandry training and environmental enrichment are both important advancements associated with current behavioural welfare practices. Additionally, the use of training procedures has been proposed as a form of enrichment, with the implication that training can produce beneficial behavioural welfare results. This paper examines the concept of training as enrichment through three distinct ways training procedures could enrich: (i) training facilitates enrichment usage; (ii) training modifies interactions, conspecific or otherwise; and (iii) training expands behavioural repertoires. Within each category, the paper focuses on past research that provides empirical support for training functioning as enrichment, as well as related areas of research that provide additional evidence. Previous studies support the claim that training is enriching, with additional research necessary to better understand how prevalent and under what conditions training procedures function as enrichment. Future training research should examine these potential enrichment effects, including methodology that allows for comparisons to traditional enrichment, the use of welfare diversity/variability indices, and the effects of learning on trainers and trainees alike.

Activity Budget Comparisons Using Long-Term Observations of a Group of Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) under Human Care: Implications for Animal Welfare

Simple Summary

Behavioral observations are widely considered easy-to-apply and straightforward animal welfare measures for animals under human care. In the present behavioral study, the activity budgets of a group of bottlenose dolphins are analyzed for nine different observation periods over five years. For some of the time periods, some extraordinary events took place, such as construction work. Our results show that activity budgets are significantly impacted by individual factors (e.g., age) and external factors (e.g., group composition). Furthermore, the presence of construction noise significantly affects the occurrence of other behaviors (fast swimming), as well as the dolphins’ performance during daily training sessions. We find that behavioral monitoring is an essential tool for assessing and ascertaining how the welfare of dolphins under human care can be improved, especially if used together with other measures, such as keeper ratings or health assessments.

Abstract

Zoos and aquaria must provide optimal husbandry conditions and the highest welfare standards for their animals. How the welfare state of an animal or a group of animals can be precisely assessed is currently under debate, and new approaches are necessary to reliably evaluate changes in welfare. One particular measure that is easily applicable is behavioral observations. However, for dolphins and other cetaceans under human care, reliable behavior-based measures are rare. Using long-term observations of a group of bottlenose dolphins, we investigate how their activity budgets and different behaviors changed over time and are impacted by construction noise. Additionally, we investigate whether behavioral differences are also reflected in changes in the dolphins’ performance during daily training sessions. Our results show that construction noise significantly alters the dolphins’ behavior. Play behavior decreases during construction periods; most importantly, the frequency of fast swimming activities significantly increased, and at the same time, a decrease in training performance is found. Additionally, inter- and intraindividual behavioral differences are attributed to factors, such as age or weaning. Significant changes in a dolphin’s activity budget can also pose potential welfare concerns. Thus, this study highlights the importance of regularly assessing and analyzing the behavior of dolphins under human care. Behavioral observations are essential welfare indicators and can—when complemented with other measures, such as assessment of training performance—provide zoo staff with important information about each individual’s state of welfare.

Behavioural Diversity Study in Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) Groups and Its Implications for Welfare Assessments

Simple Summary

For the first time, a behavioural diversity study was conducted on several bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) groups within European Association of Aquatic Mammals (EAAM) accredited facilities. This study was carried out by professional animal staff on 54 dolphins, and the goal was to analyse behavioural diversity in bottlenose dolphins at the group level to investigate how particular factors might impact the diversity of behaviours within the group and to discuss its implications for dolphin welfare assessments. This study showed its feasibility and revealed impacting factors that would need to be considered in future dolphin welfare assessments. We strongly believe that behavioural evaluations and measurements could be applied routinely on cetaceans under professional care to assess their welfare.

Abstract

In the recent past, animal welfare studies have tried to determine the best animal welfare measures and indicators. Expression of behavioural diversity is considered a potential positive welfare indicator, and to the authors’ knowledge, it has not been validated nor studied in cetaceans. For the first time, a behavioural diversity study on bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) groups was conducted at six European facilities. The study was carried out by the animal care staff, biologists and veterinarians and included 54 dolphins housed in several group compositions at the different participating facilities. The goal of our study was to analyse behavioural diversity in bottlenose dolphins at the group level to investigate how particular factors might impact the diversity of behaviours within the group and to discuss its implications for dolphin welfare assessments. Eight factors (i.e., “observer location”, “number of individuals”, “age class”, “sex”, “social grouping”, “presence/absence of leading male”, “presence/absence of visitors” and “enrichment provision”) impacted the behavioural diversity of the observed groups, while no significant impact of the factors “time of day” and “activity before/after observation” could be found. Our study showed the feasibility of this kind of approach for cetaceans under professional care and the relevance to considering this parameter in dolphin welfare studies, despite certain limitations that warrant further research.

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

Simple Summary

Traditional conservation strategy focuses on population-level effects. However, the rapidly evolving scientific discipline of animal welfare science, in conjunction with growing societal expectations around the value of individuals, is prompting change in conservation. Despite growing recognition of this approach in terrestrial conservation efforts, limited application of animal welfare science to marine mammals has been observed. To investigate the factors underlying this disparity, we undertook an initial “Welfare in the Wild” workshop at the 32nd European Cetacean Society conference (La Spezia, Italy) to explore expert opinion on this topic. Secondly, we analysed the English language peer-reviewed literature to assess to what extent marine mammal welfare research is reported. The results of the workshop reveal a range of views about the scientific discipline of animal welfare science, with participants’ definitions varying depending on their disciplinary expertise. Meanwhile, the extensive literature review spanning 1950 to July 2020 revealed extremely low reporting of research related to welfare in the context of marine mammals, with only 0.96% (n = 299) of all published articles on marine mammal taxa (n = 31,221) featuring the word welfare in either the title, abstract or keywords. This highlighted a need to explore differences and distil common themes. Here we suggest practical solutions to the language, translation and reception issues of this cross-disciplinary collaboration between animal welfare science and marine mammal conservation.

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.