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Key points
- Research methods and scientists' arrogance harm animals and compromise their well-being and the quality of data that are collected.
- Wildlife researchers often underestimate the effect they have on the animals they study.
- When those who feel badly about doing invasive research talk about it, it can help spread the word about the "biodiversity of sentience."
Sound science requires animal subjects to be physically, physiologically, and behaviorally unharmed. Accordingly, publication of methods that contravenes animal welfare principles risks perpetuating inhumane approaches and bad science.1
There's nothing more exciting than watching nonhuman animals (animals) in the field. The data that are collected are "more real," as one colleague puts it, and reflect how they live in their natural homes or when they're free to move about while paying careful attention to who their neighbors are—friend, foe, or somewhere in between. But, fieldwork, like research on captive animals, isn't always user-friendly to the animals themselves, a concern many researchers and I have had for a long time.1–3
In a recent outstanding essay called "Fieldwork results, anonymity, rare observations and cognition-questions of method, biases, and interpretations," Australian biologist Dr. Gisela Kaplan writes about the downside of fieldwork when researchers overstep their bounds. She raises numerous issues about how field research is conducted and how it affects the behavior of the animals and the reliability and usefulness of the results. Different methods and different levels of intrusion into the lives of animals—often called "the instrument effect"—can also explain why there are disagreements among researchers about what is the "normal and typical" behavior of individuals of a given species.3
Here's a summary of Kaplan's concerns. She stresses that researchers themselves can have negative effects on the behavior and emotional lives of the animals they're studying that influence what the animals do, so the quality of data collected is compromised and misleading. For example, in her review of what the results of fieldwork on animals mean and how they can be influenced by researchers, Kaplan writes
Worse still: human-induced fear can lead to natural top predators increasing their kill rate [163]. Invasive and aggressive interventions by humans can also lead to the collapse of entire niche structures and species co-existence [162]. The point is that the instigators of field research that may have brought about any such harm, even if only just going to nest sites and taking some eggs, then walk away [168] do not see what behaviour follows. The data then collected, however, reflect the post-manipulation phase of behaviour and it may not be at all what an individual, pair or group might have done without such intervention. In summary, there is plenty of scientific evidence now that we, as a species and as researchers, have had a detrimental effect on birds and on wild animals in general. [The numbers refer to references in her essay.]
Research methods and arrogance make for bad science that compromises animals' well-being, emotions, and the quality of data that are collected.
How researchers influence the behavior and emotions of animals under study—what's obvious and what's hidden—is among the reasons why some people argue that noninvasive research produces more accurate and useful data. The information researchers are collecting and analyzing isn’t representative of who the birds (or other animals in other studies) are. They’re bad and unreliable data similar to information that is collected in invasive and highly controlled laboratory research because the birds are stressed and fearful.4
Researchers’ arrogance and dismissal of the emotional lives of the animals they are studying is a major concern. Kaplan also notes the following:
In personal interactions, there have been ecologists who became extremely aggressive and angry and dismissed cognition and emotions as ‘rubbish’ and on the topic of conservation they asserted that academics dealing with cognitive ethology or compassionate conservation 'didn’t know what they were talking about', while others, in personal contact, felt bad about causing pain to animals but accepted it as long as they it was for ‘the greater good’.5
Surely, animal emotions aren't "rubbish." I've often suggested that when people talk and write the results of these sorts of studies their titles should read something like “The Social Behavior of Stressed Birds.” It is their responsibility to tell people that they know they have toyed with the emotional lives of the animals, and their results represent birds who aren’t typical of their species but, rather, birds who are treated and studied under the conditions they impose.
Their admission can also help people learn more about what I call "the biodiversity of sentience"—when researchers admit they're causing pain and suffering it tells people that the birds or other animals are sentient, feeling beings. This could be one upside of their feeling badly but surely is not reason enough to continue with that sort of research. It's also important to note that the behavior of nonsentient animals, whoever they may be, also can change with intrusions into their lives just as we influence plants.6
What goes around comes around: Do bad data make for diminishing returns for the animals themselves?
Who's really benefiting from more science? There are compounding effects—often unintentional and unknown—when data are compromised. Let's end by considering a few big questions. While we've learned a lot about the emotional lives of other animals and sentience in the past 20 or so years, are the animals really benefiting from this knowledge, much of which we've known for many previous years? There's no doubt that what we've learned is extremely interesting, but people often ask me, "How much is really new?" and "Didn't we know enough before to grant animals the right to have better lives than they were having when humans decided to use them in this or that project?"
One academic asked me, "Are there diminishing returns for the animals from studies of cognitive ethology and comparative psychology?" This is a very good question. These questions would require a good number of long books, but my simple answer is, "There likely are diminishing returns for the animals because we knew enough years ago to treat nonhumans much better, with more compassion, dignity, respect, kindness, and empathy." So, perhaps especially for animals who are used in invasive studies where their emotional lives are compromised or in which they are harmed and killed, what we've learned really doesn't help them along.
Even research that is meant to be noninvasive—just being there—can negatively affect the lives of birds and other animals. We must take all precautions to be sure we are not influencing their emotional lives. When data are contaminated, we let the animals down, and what we learn might not really help them along because it's a false image of who they are and what they do in different social and nonsocial contexts.
References
1. Field KA, Paquet PC, Artelle K, Proulx G, Brook RK, et al. (2020) Publication reform to safeguard wildlife from researcher harm. PLOS Biology 18(5): (View correction). The abstract for this landmark essay reads: "Despite abundant focus on responsible care of laboratory animals, we argue that inattention to the maltreatment of wildlife constitutes an ethical blind spot in contemporary animal research. We begin by reviewing significant shortcomings in legal and institutional oversight, arguing for the relatively rapid and transformational potential of editorial oversight at journals in preventing harm to vertebrates studied in the field and outside the direct supervision of institutions. Straightforward changes to animal care policies in journals, which our analysis of 206 journals suggests are either absent (34%), weak, incoherent, or neglected by researchers, could provide a practical, effective, and rapidly imposed safeguard against unnecessary suffering. The Animals in Research: Reporting On Wildlife (ARROW) guidelines we propose here, coupled with strong enforcement, could result in significant changes to how animals involved in wildlife research are treated. The research process would also benefit. Sound science requires animal subjects to be physically, physiologically, and behaviorally unharmed. Accordingly, publication of methods that contravenes animal welfare principles risks perpetuating inhumane approaches and bad science."
2. David Foster. Wildlife Researchers’ Good Intentions Often Can Be Deadly for Animals. Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2002. This piece offers plenty of examples of how research methods—causing the "instrument effect"— influence the behavior of the animals being studied including how wing tags induced ruddy ducks to spend less time courting and more time sleeping; ear tags on white-footed mice kept them from grooming away ticks; mallards wearing 1-ounce radio transmitters rested and preened more, started their nests later, and laid fewer and smaller eggs; and scientists studying endangered Hawaiian honeycreepers used radio transmitters with long, limp antennas, only to find birds hanging helplessly from tree limbs, entangled by the antennas.
3. See "The hidden side of animal cognition research: Scientists’ attitudes toward bias, replicability and scientific practice" for a thorough discussion of how common scientific methods used in laboratory research can influence the quality of the data that are collected.
4. There are debates among researchers about whether highly controlled studies produce more accurate data on animal behavior from which inferences are made about what they know and what they're feeling. Highly controlled studies all too often do not allow animals to express their normal range of behavior; they may be bored, or they may simply not want to do what they're asked to do. So-called "uncontrolled" field research, on the other hand, when done right, allows the animals to express normal behavior and allows researchers to get a better handle on species-typical behavior. My take from many years of research on different canids supports this idea because, depending on the questions at hand, often the animals can't do what they want and need to do in captive situations. See, for example, "'What Do All These Dog Studies Really Mean?'" and "How to Make Studies of Animal Behavior More Reliable."
5. See: Are plants intelligent?; The Heartbeat of Trees: An Uplifting Spring Read; Smarty Plants: Research Shows They Think, Feel, and Learn; What’s It Like to Be a Plant? An Interview With "Planta Sapiens" Author.
6) For further discussions of cognitive ethology and compassionate conservation and why most critiques are extremely misleading see Conservation, Sentience, and Personhood and references therein.
Compassionate Conservation Isn't Seriously or Fatally Flawed.
Compassionate Conservation Isn't Veiled Animal Liberation.
Compassionate Conservation Finally Comes of Age: Killing in the name of conservation doesn't work.
Kaplan, Gisela. Fieldwork results, anonymity, rare observations and cognition-questions of method, biases and interpretations. In&Sight, June 29, 2022,
