Wild Horse Welfare: Assessment and associations with population and behavioural ecology
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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Knowledge of the welfare of wild animals contributes vital information to ethical, legal, and political debates about our interaction with wild animals and their habitats. Despite this, there has been little insight into how to assess their welfare and factors affecting it. Wild horse management exemplifies a highly controversial wildlife issue, where to date, welfare has not been assessed or incorporated into management decision making.
My thesis aims to (i) develop methodologies for scientifically assessing the welfare of free-roaming wild animal species, (ii) apply these methods to assess the welfare of free-roaming wild horses across a range of habitats, and (iii) explore the spatial and temporal changes in welfare, and the relationship between welfare status, population dynamics, social organisation, habitat use, and resource availability.
Chapter 1 introduces the controversies in wild horse management and why welfare assessment is important. In Chapter 2 I develop a novel conceptual framework, the ‘Ten-Stage Protocol’, for advancing the practical capacity to assess welfare in free-roaming wild animal species. Chapters 3 to 8 then apply this framework to wild horses, demonstrating how this protocol can be practically applied to obtain meaningful, systematic, structured, transparent, and scientifically objective assessments of welfare. Whilst my thesis is based on free-roaming wild horses, it has been developed specifically to form the basis of application of these processes to other species.
In Chapter 3, I review the current state of wild horse knowledge, presented in a holistic and multidisciplinary framework. I demonstrate (Chapter 4) the type of research required to address knowledge gaps, using the example of wild horse parasitology.
Chapter 5 investigates the use of remote cameras for identifying individual wild horses across different habitats, and for acquiring data on an extensive range of welfare indicators. Chapter 6 comprises scientific validation of these welfare indicators and refinement of a Five Domains welfare grading scheme. I then (Chapter 7) evaluate population dynamics, and temporal and spatial changes in social organisation and habitat use of a wild horse population over a 15-month period, using the remote camera methodology established in Chapter 5. I further evaluate welfare status demonstrating the cascading effects of resource availability, and how this correlates with population dynamics, social organisation, and habitat use (Chapter 8).
Finally, Chapter 9 summarises how this research has advanced knowledge, assisted with management decision-making to improve the welfare of wild horse populations, and contributed to conflict resolution in wild horse management.
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