Research
Measuring Welfare Indicators
I am interested in how we can measure and understand how different life events, living conditions and interactions impact animal welfare, specifically through measuring indicators of their physiological stress, health and behaviour. In my PhD I have studied this issue in a population of semi-captive Asian elephants in Myanmar.
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Physiological stress
I have measured different indicators in blood and faeces such as glucocorticoid hormones and white blood cell ratios which are known to increase in response to stress and prolonged production negatively impacts individual health.
Health
Along with specialist elephant veterinarians in Myanmar and other members of our research group, we monitor aspects of elephant health, such as their electrolyte balance, their immunological health and parasite infection as well as monitoring their heart rate/blood pressure and body condition.
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Behaviour
It can be useful to also collect behavioural data as a non-invasive indicator which is less likely to suffer from habituation. Again collaborating with other researchers in our group, I have collected data using ethograms of known stress behaviours as well as measuring cooperative behaviours between elephants and their handlers.
I have worked closely with veterinarians Dr Htoo Htoo Aung and Dr U Kyaw Nyein in Myanmar to collect data, as well as Dr Diogo Franco Dos Santos, a post-doc in our research group who developed many of the methods we use to monitor elephant health during his PhD.
I have studied elephant behaviour along with Dr Martin Seltmann, Oceane Liehrmann and Jonathan Webb in our research group
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Human-elephant interactions
In my PhD, I have investigated how the relationships that elephants have with their traditional handlers, or mahouts, impact their wellbeing. I have done this by looking at how an elephant's relationship length with their mahout and their mahout's total experience of working with elephants in the past, influence their welfare indicators.
Elephant Training
I have looked particularly at the early stages of the mahout-elephant relationship, studying elephant calves during their taming procedure which is a largely neglected topic, sometimes seen as taboo. I argue that it is necessary to acknowledge and study the taming process in order to be able to empirically inform management decisions and improve calf welfare. In one study I assessed calf traits historically associated with higher mortality in elephant calves, to pinpoint more vulnerable calves. I have also carried out the first empirical assessement of elephant calves undergoing taming collecting measures of welfare over the most intense first ten days of the taming procedure and the following six months to understand the extent and duration of any effects.
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