Citation

Author Website

jennifervonk.com

Thread

Karen A. Owens, Gosia Bryja, and Marc Bekoff, Wildlife conservation: The importance of individual personality traits and sentience

Abstract

Owens et al. (2024) add to the growing voices stressing the importance of considering individual differences in animal welfare and conservation. I advocate for an additional emphasis on the importance of between species comparisons of the degree of individual variation in cognition and emotion within species. A better understanding of the factors predicting within-species variability will help conservationists target their efforts. Additionally, I caution against invoking circularity in using “behavioural traits” to predict related behaviours.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

Author Biography

Jennifer Vonk is a professor of psychology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She examines cognition and behaviour in diverse species (amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, humans) with the goal of better understanding the evolutionary factors giving rise to cognitive capacities and improving the welfare of captive species. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1845