Holly Elmore

This paper describes the past and current rodent pest control landscape with a particular focus on the harms of rodenticidal poisons and the possibilities for rodent birth control as a cruelty-minimizing alternative. Because rodent birth control is most available in the United States, the focus of this paper is primarily on the U.S.

This report provides an overview of five organizations that dedicate substantial effort to improving wild animal welfare. The researchers identify commonalities in their approaches, as well as gaps that other organizations could fill.

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.