Wild animal lives through a welfare lens

Our in-person and online Seminar Series on Wild Animal Lives Through a Welfare Lens is delivered in partnership with the Royal Veterinary College and the Institute of Zoology (Zoological Society of London) as part of the MSc Wild Animal Biology.

Seminar 1

Seminar 2

Seminar 3

Seminar 4

Seminar 5

Seminar 5  |  March 19, 2025

Conservation interventions and wild animal welfare (applying welfare knowledge to wildlife)

This seminar features Wild Animal Initiative grantees Emma Mellor, Teresa Romero, and Morteza Nadiri.

A panel discussion follows, chaired by Science Director Luke Hecht.

All sessions of this seminar series are hybrid events. You can attend online via Zoom or in-person.

Date

March 19, 2025

Time

3-5 pm

In-person location:

New location: Lecture Hall 3, Royal Veterinary College
Royal College Street
London
NW1 0TU
United Kingdom

The Great Hall is directly in front of the entrance. Please ask at reception if you need assistance.

Venue map

Registration is closed

Speakers and panelists

Emma Mellor

Speaker

Welfare during avian conservation translocations: 'excess' deaths and estimating the extent of welfare compromise

Emma Mellor is a Wild Animal Initiative Research Fellow at Bristol University, where she earned her PhD in 2020. Her research interests revolve around species differences in welfare, which she uses to explore evolutionary explanations for problems using phylogenetic comparative methods. Her comparative research aims to identify welfare risk factors - i.e., species biological traits - and use these to make tailored recommendations to improve wellbeing. So far, she has successfully used this multi-species approach to identify risk factors for problems in captive wild animals, e.g., pet parrots and zoo-housed carnivores. Her current WAI-funded project focuses on free-living wild animals, aiming to identify risk factors for conservation translocation outcomes, like post-release mortality rates.

Teresa Romero

Speaker

Raman spectroscopy as a novel non-invasive technique to assess wildlife welfare

Teresa is a member of the Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Portsmouth and co-director of the Macaca Maura Project. Prior to this, she worked at the University of Lincoln and held postdoc positions at The University of Tokyo (Japan) and Emory University (US). Teresa’s primary research interest focuses on the social and emotional skills that animals employ when making decisions about when, and with whom, to interact. This interest has taken her to explore aspects of sociality, conflict resolution, and empathy driven behaviors in a range of animals. In recent years, Teresa has become strongly interested in applying fundamental knowledge in animal social complexity to the welfare of both captive and wild animals.

Morteza Naderi

Speaker

Bears under Stress: Challenges and Conservation Solutions

Dr. Morteza Naderi is a distinguished Associate Professor at Sakarya University (Turkey). His research interests encompass diverse aspects of ecology and conservation, with a particular focus on large carnivores' ecology, molecular ecology, and landscape genetics. He is the author of three academic books in Persian, addressing topics in wildlife ecology, conservation biology, and wildlife management. Dr. Naderi is also the chairman of the Biodiversity Conservation Society.

Luke Hecht

Chair

Luke completed his PhD in molecular ecology at Durham University, focusing on the use of population genetics to compare the demographic histories of wild animal populations. Luke has also done research in microbiology and geology related to understanding the limits and signatures of life on Earth and potentially other planets. Luke is currently the science director at Wild Animal Initiative.