Salivary Bioscience and Research on Animal Welfare and Conservation Science

Animal welfare research strives to empirically assess how care and management practices impact the health and well-being of animals across diverse settings. This includes agricultural, biomedical, and companion animals as well as animals in professionally managed populations in zoos and aquariums. Tools developed for use with animals in professionally managed care may also have applications to conservation science, which is the interdisciplinary study and protection of biodiversity. Historically, interest in saliva arose out of a desire to find less invasive alternatives to blood that allow for near real-time monitoring of physiology and repeated sampling on shorter timescales. In the time since, applications for saliva have grown to include evaluating the response of animals to management practices and novel stimuli, reproductive profiling, and health monitoring. In this chapter, we emphasize the current state and challenges of implementing salivary research in animal welfare settings. Furthermore, we discuss how implementation of salivary research in zoos and aquariums for welfare purposes is facilitating novel research applications related to species conservation. Overall, our aim is to provide a critical examination of both the applications and limitations of salivary research to the fields of animal welfare and conservation science.