Wildlife legislation must recognise welfare needs of sentient marine mammals
Experts who attended a ground-breaking workshop held in London at the end of 2019, led by Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) in partnership with the UK Wild Animal Welfare Committee (WAWC), have published a report on UK marine mammal welfare.
The workshop was attended by twenty of the UK's leading animal welfare experts, including veterinary surgeons, legal specialists, social scientists, biologists and expert NGO representatives. The report focuses on both legal and policy processes and concludes that policy makers, conservation managers, governments and other stakeholders should consider the welfare of individual marine mammals when making decisions about conservation law, policy and their implementation.
The experts concluded that, if governments do not start to take a more sophisticated approach towards assessing and protecting marine mammal welfare they could be under-estimating both acute and chronic stressors in these sentient mammals. This is out of step with the welfare consideration given in UK law to domesticated animals and, to some extent, to terrestrial wild animals.
Conversely, the report points out that monitoring welfare impacts on individual animals could bring multiple benefits. These include meeting the legal and moral obligation of humans to protect animals from anthropogenic welfare impacts, plus the benefit to individual animals and the fact that welfare indicators could act as early indicators of problems for the conservation of populations.
WAWC member and senior policy manager at WDC, Sarah Dolman, who organised the workshop, said: "Human activity can affect every aspect of the life of a marine mammal. What we do can affect not just the short-term survival of individuals, but their medium- and long-term physical and mental health, feeding and reproductive behaviour, interactions with family and pod members, awareness and social learning.
"Some laws are in place to provide for animal welfare, yet these are not adequately considered, implemented or enforced by decision makers and our nature conservation statutory agencies. This needs to change."
A summary statement from the workshop has been published in the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) journal Animal Welfare.