Building an ethical self-assessment checklist for wildlife capture: lessons from practitioner interviews

Although wildlife capture and handling are central to research and management programmes, they can raise various ethical and regulatory challenges. Ensuring ethical conduct is essential not only for scientific rigour, but also for the social acceptability of field projects. However, formal oversight systems (e.g., IACUCs), developed for laboratory animal research, often struggle to address the realities of field ecology, where conditions are unpredictable and decisions are highly context-dependent (Sikes & Paul, 2013). Therefore, practitioners must navigate complex ethical tensions – such as balancing animal welfare with research objectives or ecological outcomes, managing risks to staff and addressing local communities’ concern – with limited structured guidance (Minteer & Collins, 2005).
To support ethical decision-making in wildlife capture and handling, we are developing a customised version of ETHAS (de Mori et al., 2024), a checklist-based ethical self-assessment tool designed to evaluate wildlife conservation practices and procedures. Available globally as a web-based platform, ETHAS enables practitioners to access the checklist, document decisions and reflect on best practices. Moreover, by facilitating reflection to address concerns related to animal welfare, environmental, social and research ethics, ETHAS provides a neutral platform for transparent decision-making and communication among the whole project team.
This framework customisation, developed as pilot phase focusing on terrestrial mammals through a participatory process, is based on semi-structured interviews with practitioners involved in capture and handling across Europe and North America, including field biologists, wildlife veterinarians, managers, and oversight professionals.
This bottom-up approach shaped the design, content, and implementation strategy, ensuring that the checklist is practical, context-sensitive, and applicable to real-world field scenarios. By integrating practitioners' perspectives, the tool is designed to promote ethical reflection at every stage of a project, from design to field implementation. This talk will explore the outcomes of the interviews, focusing on practitioners’ experiences with field procedures, recognised regulatory, logistical, or institutional constraints, and perceived ethical tensions that may arise while planning and conducting fieldwork. It will also discuss how these insights informed the structure and content of the checklist, refined its ethically relevant goals, and identified specific areas where additional guidance is most needed to uphold ethical standards.