Core Concepts: Assessing welfare

By Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-03T18:11 (+13)

This is a linkpost to https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/assessing-welfare

This is a crosspost for Core Concepts: Assessing welfare by Wild Animal Initiative, which was originally published on their blog on 2 April 2025.

April 2, 2025

Validating ways to assess welfare is one of our priority research areas. To answer questions about wild animals’ subjective experiences, we have to be able to assess their welfare at a given point in time, and how it changes over time. 

We define welfare as the valenced affective state of an animal over a given period of time — or in simpler terms, the goodness or badness that an animal is mentally experiencing. We can visualize an animal’s valenced affective state with an arousal-valence model, where the x-axis is valence (the quality of welfare — positive, negative, or neutral) and the y-axis is arousal (the intensity of the affective state).

The valence-arousal model
Fig. 1: The arousal-valence model

It’s helpful to be familiar with arousal-valence models when considering the different types of assessments of welfare, because some of those assessments provide information about valence and others provide information about arousal.

Welfare assessments

Welfare can’t be measured directly, so instead, scientists use a variety of indicators and metrics to make well-informed inferences about welfare.

Indicators are measured variables that allow us to infer something about the subjective welfare experience of an individual animal. There are whole-animal indicators, which can give a holistic picture of the animal’s emotional state and sometimes their state of arousal, as well as partial indicators, which provide information about a single component of welfare, a single cause of the welfare state, or a single effect of the welfare state.

We also sometimes use environmental indicators, which are partial indicators that assess a resource or challenge, like predation. But these lack a direct relationship to valence. You can think of these more like welfare risk indicators: They give you an idea of something in the environment that could be affecting the welfare state.

Welfare metrics are assessments that incorporate multiple indicators to provide one score or categorical state of overall welfare. The welfare metrics we have now were developed for captive animals; there is not yet a metric specifically designed for wild animals only. We think with more research, a wild animal welfare metric that is applicable and feasible across taxa could be developed in the near future.

Examples of welfare indicators

It’s important to remember that no single indicator is sufficient on its own to assess welfare. Wild animal welfare scientists use a combination of indicators to infer an animal’s emotional state. Below are some of the indicators they might use.

Whole-animal behavioral indicators

Partial behavioral indicators

Whole-animal physiological indicators

Partial physiological indicators

There are many partial physiological indicators available, but many of them have not been validated, or they come with a lot of caveats. These are a few of the most promising ones for studying wild animal welfare.

Examples of welfare metrics

Ongoing and future research

These indicators and metrics are useful for wild animal welfare scientists now, but we still need more indicators and metrics to be validated to help us learn about more welfare components, and about the welfare of more species.

Validating welfare indicators is one of our research priorities. As of the time this post was published, we have given grants to researchers working to validate new welfare indicators and metrics such as: cognitive bias tests for bees, squirrels, and birds; a frailty index for insects; and fecal glucocorticoid metabolites as a suitable non-invasive alternative to blood analysis.


SummaryBot @ 2025-07-03T18:52 (+3)

Executive summary: This post from Wild Animal Initiative outlines current approaches to assessing wild animal welfare using the arousal-valence model, indicators, and composite metrics—highlighting both promising tools and the need for further validation, especially for wild species. Key points:

  1. Welfare is defined as an animal’s valenced affective state—how positive or negative their experiences are over time—often visualized through an arousal-valence model where valence represents emotional quality and arousal represents intensity.
  2. Welfare can’t be measured directly, so scientists infer it using indicators (behavioral, physiological, and environmental) and welfare metrics that aggregate multiple indicators.
  3. Whole-animal indicators (like Qualitative Behavioral Assessment or activity budgets) provide a broad view of emotional state, while partial indicators (like fear behaviors or hormone levels) target specific components.
  4. Environmental indicators assess potential welfare risks (e.g., predation) rather than current welfare states and are thus less direct.
  5. Existing welfare metrics like the Five Domains Model and cumulative pain scores are in use, but most were developed for captive animals and need adaptation for wild contexts.
  6. Validation of new indicators is a research priority, with current efforts focused on tools like cognitive bias tests for birds and bees, frailty indexes for insects, and non-invasive stress measurements such as fecal glucocorticoid metabolites.

 

 

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