Monitoring wild animal welfare via vocalizations (Rethink Priorities)
This article describes how various types and features of vocalizations could act as welfare metrics for wild animals and how a remote acoustic sensing network could be used to collect this type of data non-invasively.
- Animal vocalizations vary with emotional state (due to physiological changes)
- Certain types of vocalizations are only produced in certain situations (e.g. alarm calls), which could give us information about the lives of wild animals
- Vocalizations can be recorded from the wild remotely, using microphones placed in the field
- Machine learning techniques could be applied to recognize the species and analyze welfare-indicating features in the vocalizations, or recognize what type of call it is
- This may help indicate the welfare status of whole groups of populations of wild animals
- Studying affective vocalizations could give insight into animal welfare in many different contexts, not just remote sensing
This article is designed to (i) describe how animal vocalizations can be used as welfare indicators, (ii) describe how vocalization and acoustic data can be both collected and analyzed, and (iii) evaluate the benefits and limitations of remote acoustic sensing for understanding and building a field of wild animal welfare (WAW).
People who are generally interested in animal welfare as a cause area should find this article worthwhile, as well as people who might be interested in pursuing this idea as a research project. The sections on costs and equipment are included for someone who might want to start remote acoustic monitoring for WAW **today, **but I anticipate the whole project would have more payoff in the medium term. This is both because it will take time to learn about the welfare indicators in vocalizations of many more species and because field-building and gaining the traction in interest and funding will also take time.
If you are not someone looking to execute this idea, but are interested in the viability or potential of vocalizations as animal welfare-indicators (especially in the context of WAW), I recommend reading the ‘Introduction to Affective Vocalizations’ and then the ‘Scope, Neglectedness, Tractability’ sections.