Wild animal translocations: animal welfare risk assessment guidance

Introduction

In recent years in many countries, activities have been initiated that are designed to restore ecosystems at a range of scales, both to address the increasing rate of biodiversity loss and to conserve particular threatened species, i.e., species restoration or recovery. With increasing understanding and acknowledgment of animal sentience comes an ethical imperative to ensure that these activities are carried out with as little welfare cost to the sentient individual as possible. While the list of sentient species is ever growing, for practical purposes, the scope of this document only covers vertebrate animals. As we learn more about the welfare needs of different vertebrate taxa, specific implications may emerge. Without proper consideration at all stages of the translocation process there is a risk that animal welfare will be compromised. This guidance provides a framework that practitioners may wish to adopt in order to include animal welfare as part of the overall translocation evaluation.

This document discusses “wild animal translocations”, meaning operations where individual wild animals are either captured in the wild or bred in captivity prior to movement to a new location for one of a limited number of purposes.

Purposes of wild animal translocation

Conservation translocation is the intentional movement and release of a wild animal from one geographical location to another, where the primary purpose is a conservation benefit. This usually involves improving the conservation status of the focal species and/or restoring natural habitat or ecosystem functions or processes (adapted from Gaywood and Stanley-Price, 2022). The driver for many conservation translocations is the current climate/nature crisis where, in countries such as Scotland, biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate and where conservation translocations, when planned and executed well, prove to be highly effective interventions.

Definitions and guidance on how to conduct conservation translocations can be found in sources such as Conservation Translocations: Looking to the Future (ed. Gaywood et al., 2022); Scottish Code for Conservation Translocations and Best practice guidelines for Conservation Translocations in Scotland (referred to as SCCT/Best practice guidelines in this document) (National Species Reintroduction Forum, 2014); IUCN/Species Survival Commission Guidelines for Reintroductions and Other Conservation Translocations (IUCN/SSC, 2013); Reintroductions and other conservation translocations: code and guidance for England (DEFRA, 2021).

Situations where there is benefit to translocated individuals only are not considered as conservation translocations (IUCN/SSC, 2013) but this is under active consideration. Difficulties and possible solutions associated with conservation translocations were reviewed by Berger-Tal et al. (2020).

Conservation translocations can fall into two categories: population restoration and conservation introduction.

One purpose considered under population restoration is reintroduction – a conservation translocation for the specific purpose of restoring a threatened species to part of its indigenous range, to help restore the population (adapted from Gaywood and Stanley-Price, 2022). There have been high profile wild animal reintroductions in Scotland, involving translocation of species such as the white-tailed eagle, golden eagle and Eurasian beaver.

A second, but possibly more common, population restoration purpose is reinforcement – whereby animals are introduced into an existing population to augment numbers.

Assisted colonisation (sometimes referred to as assisted migration) is a conservation introduction technique involving the removal of animals (or plants) from areas that have become (or are likely to become) unsuitable due to climate change impacts (or occasionally when there are population threats due to predators), and their translocation to new sites where conditions are more suitable (often those sites, given time, they might migrate to anyway). Some consider this to be a controversial practice akin to the introduction of new species. (For a recent review see Twardek et al. (2023))

The final conservation introduction is ecological replacement, whereby an animal is moved outside of its indigenous range to mimic the ecological function of a functionally similar species that has been lost, for example through extinction.

Rewilding programmes, while focussed on habitat restoration and management, often involve translocation of species such as free-ranging large herbivores; as reported by Newton (2023), of 72 projects that were part of Britain’s Rewilding Network, 87% were using livestock as part of the management protocol.^[1] These are usually livestock species acting as ecological replacements for predecessor species, such as bred-back aurochsen, domestic or wild horses and wild pigs, but reintroduction (see above) of wild species is also involved. A wider consideration of many of the ethical issues surrounding rewilding and reintroduction of wild animals is given by Thulin and Röcklinsberg (2020).

Management translocation is not for conservation but is an operation involving the removal of “problem” animals from a location where their presence is considered undesirable. This type of translocation is also considered. Some management translocations can become conservation translocations if the animal removed from a conflict situation is released at a new site where ecosystem restoration is proposed.

Welfare translocations can occur where an individual animal is brought into temporary captivity for rehabilitation purposes, then released either at the capture site or sometimes elsewhere. Indeed, this may be one of the most common of the translocation activities.

In welfare terms, the purpose of the translocation is less relevant than the impact of the process on the individual. The individual animal, whose physical and mental welfare is likely to be impacted by the process, should remain at the centre of the discussion.