Strategic animal welfare issues: ethical and animal welfare issues arising from the killing of wildlife for disease control and environmental reasons
Ethical and animal welfare concerns about the destruction of free-living wildlife for disease control and environmental reasons have historically received little attention from animal welfare scientists, legislators or the public. Nevertheless, all vertebrates can experience pain and distress, regardless of whether they are unwanted pests or not. A wide range of methods is used to […]
Better rodent control by better regulation: regulatory incentives and regulator support to improve the humaneness of rodent control
Regulation by government can act as a constraint to improving the humaneness of rodent control, or it can be used to support improvements. How do we make sure it does one and not the other? Societal support and understanding, economic impacts and current knowledge can all ‘make or break’ progress towards improved rodent control. This […]
Rubber shots not as effective as selective culling in deterring gulls from landfill sites
Landfill managers often need to implement scaring programmes to deter gulls from feeding at their sites because the birds can be a significant nuisance for both site employees and residents of the surrounding area. Our objective was to assess the efficiency of firing rubber shots, a method assumed to be non-lethal but never tested in […]
A model for assessing the relative humaneness of pest animal control methods
The humaneness of a particular pest animal control method refers to the overall welfare impact that the method has on an individual animal.The aim of this project is to define a model for assessing the welfare impact of pest animal control methods. The main purpose of the model is to allow the comparison of distinctly […]