Assessing welfare in cetaceans — whales, dolphins, and porpoises — requires specialized methods adapted to their aquatic lifestyle and exceptional intelligence.
Cetacean welfare science faces unique methodological challenges: animals that spend most of their lives underwater, in populations that range across ocean basins, cannot be assessed using the direct observation methods appropriate for terrestrial species. Developing non-invasive welfare assessment tools — fecal hormone analysis, acoustic monitoring, satellite tracking of behavior, and remote health assessment — is a frontier of welfare science. The stakes are high: cetaceans are cognitively complex, long-lived, and face multiple anthropogenic stressors including entanglement, ship strikes, noise pollution, climate change, and prey depletion. For captive cetaceans, the welfare assessment challenge is more tractable but no less important — behavioral indicators that can be measured systematically over time provide welfare monitoring capability that has historically been absent.