Comparative assessment of capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) welfare in protected, semi-anthropized, and anthropized environments in Argentina
Grantee: Débora Silvia Racciatti
Institution: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Grant amount: $45,400
Grant type: Discovery grants
Focal species: Capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris)
Conservation status: Least concern
Disciplines: Human-wildlife conflict, physiology, animal behavior, mammalogy
Research location: Argentina
Project summary
This project compares capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) populations living in protected, semi-anthropized, and highly anthropized environments in Argentina to assess how different levels of human disturbance are associated with behavioral, physiological, and health-related welfare indicators. Using camera traps, direct observations, non-invasive fecal sampling, and body condition assessments, the team will evaluate a suite of indicators and test not only whether they vary in predicted directions across environments, but how consistently they converge across welfare domains, identifying which measures most reliably discriminate conditions of higher versus lower welfare in free-ranging populations. By integrating validated measures into a comparative welfare assessment framework, the project aims to advance the empirical foundations of wild animal welfare science and generate evidence to inform welfare-aware wildlife management and coexistence strategies.
Why we funded this project
This project addresses a critical but underexplored question in wild animal welfare science: how anthropogenic landscape transformations affect not just population-level metrics, but also the welfare of individual wild animals. It provides a methodological proof of concept by evaluating a multi-domain suite of non-invasive behavioral, physiological, and health-related indicators that can be validated under real-world field conditions, explicitly assessing their sensitivity, directionality, and cross-domain convergence across contrasting anthropogenic contexts.