Bee happy:Bumblebees show decision-making that reflects emotion-like states

Bumblebees show decision-making that reflects emotion-like states</jats:p

If insects have phenomenal consciousness, could they suffer?

Klein & Barron’s (K & B’s) suggestion that insects have the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is a refreshing and challenging departure from the cautious and agnostic stance that is taken by many researchers when considering this possibility. It is impossible to falsify the sceptic’s view that neural and behavioural parallels between humans and insects need not imply either similar conscious experience or even any phenomenal consciousness in insects at all. But if K & B are right, it is important to consider the possible contents of insect consciousness. Here we discuss whether affective consciousness, with its implications for potential suffering, might also be part of the simulated perceptual conscious world that K & B propose

Producing a group handbook to improve research culture and inclusivity – our experiences

BackgroundWe were awarded funds to create a handbook for the Animal Welfare and Behaviour (AWB) group at Bristol Veterinary School. This work was financed by the Enhancing Research Culture Fund distributed by the University of Bristol, and supplied by Research England. Between January and July 2023 we collectively discussed, developed, drafted, and delivered our 66-page handbook. Here is the process we used, details of what we learned along the way, our next steps, and what our members think of the final product. You can find our handbook using the QR code below, or go to: https://osf.io/a3xs

Bridging the gap:human emotions and animal emotions

Our experiences of the conscious mental states that we call emotions drive our interest in whether such states also exist in other animals. Because linguistic report can be used as a gold standard (albeit indirect) indicator of subjective emotional feelings in humans but not other species, how can we investigate animal emotions and what exactly do we mean when we use this term? Linguistic reports of human emotion give rise to emotion concepts (discrete emotions; dimensional models), associated objectively measurable behavioral and bodily emotion indicators, and understanding of the emotion contexts that generate specific states. We argue that many animal studies implicitly translate human emotion concepts, indicators and contexts, but that explicit consideration of the underlying pathways of inference, their theoretical basis, assumptions, and pitfalls, and how they relate to conscious emotional feelings, is needed to provide greater clarity and less confusion in the conceptualization and scientific study of animal emotion

A Systematic Review of the Use of Technology to Monitor Welfare in Zoo Animals:Is There Space for Improvement?

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Ensuring appropriate animal welfare to promote wildlife conservation is a top priority of modern zoos, leading to greater effort to improve welfare monitoring approaches. However, more traditional procedures can present some limitations, while the implementation of technology might become an extra tool to comply with the need of a more efficient welfare assessment. This study aimed to summarise the available body of research on technologies used for the assessment of animal welfare in zoos. The results revealed that the majority of publications were published from 2015 onwards suggesting that this research field is still young. So far, the use of technology to assess zoo animal welfare has focused mainly on large mammals likely due to the emotional impact and interest that they have on the public and media worldwide. In addition, despite the employment of both detached and wearable sensors to assess animal welfare in zoos, implementation of algorithms to enable real-time monitoring of the animals is still scarce compared to research on farm animals. Greater application of technologies in zoo research and on more taxa should be the focus of future studies, so that another effective welfare assessment approach can be used together with more traditional procedures to improve zoo animal welfare and ultimately promote wildlife conservation. ABSTRACT: A top priority of modern zoos is to ensure good animal welfare (AW), thus, efforts towards improving AW monitoring are increasing. Welfare assessments are performed through more traditional approaches by employing direct observations and time-consuming data collection that require trained specialists. These limitations may be overcome through automated monitoring using wearable or remotely placed sensors. However, in this fast-developing field, the level of automated AW monitoring used in zoos is unclear. Hence, the aim of this systematic literature review was to investigate research conducted on the use of technology for AW assessment in zoos with a focus on real-time automated monitoring systems. The search led to 19 publications with 18 of them published in the last six years. Studies focused on mammals (89.5%) with elephant as the most studied species followed by primates. The most used technologies were camera (52.6%) and wearable sensors (31.6%) mainly used to measure behaviour, while the use of algorithms was reported in two publications only. This research area is still young in zoos and mainly focused on large mammals. Despite an increase in publications employing automated AW monitoring in the last years, the potential for this to become an extra useful tool needs further research