Abstract
1. Wildlife research by citizen scientists, involving the capture and handling of animals, provides clear scientific benefits, but also potential risks to animal welfare. We explore debates about how best to regulate such work to ensure that it is undertaken in an ethical manner.
2. We focus on the UK as a case study, drawing on qualitative research and stakeholder engagement events. We show that because trapping and marking of certain species requires minimal licensing, training and justification, some argue for increased formal regulation to minimise risks to animal welfare. However, others have reflected on the already complex regulatory landscape affecting wildlife research, and have expressed concern that introducing additional formal regulations could potentially make citizen science working with wildlife more difficult. Informal regulation could therefore offer a preferable alternative.
3. We set out three steps that could be taken to open up conversations about ethics and regulation of wildlife-focussed citizen science, in the UK and elsewhere: (a) take stock of wildlife-focussed citizen science in terms of numbers and harms to animal welfare; (b) assess the state of formal regulations and consider reforms; and (c) consider informal regulations as alternatives or additions to formal regulations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 4-16 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | People and Nature |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 6 Oct 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Feb 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We gratefully acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust, which funds the Animal Research Nexus programme (Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award WT205393/A/16/Z). For their support for running the 6 November 2019 panel discussion, we gratefully thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which funded the panel as part of the Oxford Festival of Social Science, the Oxford Museum of Natural History for their support in hosting this event (1906‐FOSS‐470 Palmer), and Jamie Lorimer for chairing the panel. We additionally thank Keble College in Oxford for its support in running the POLEs workshop (30 September–1 October, 2019), along with the workshop attendees. We particularly thank Zoe Belshaw for her suggestion of creating a mnemonic for use by citizen scientists and other researchers who work with animals outwith the A(SP)A. Finally, we wish to thank our AnNex colleagues and POLEs research participants for their ongoing support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society
Keywords
- animal welfare
- biotelemetry
- capture
- citizen science
- conservation
- ethics
- handling
- trapping
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics