The Significance of Mate Choice: Exploring its Role in Captive Animal Welfare

Abstract

The ability to express normal behavior is crucial for animal welfare. While behaviors such as foraging are often recognized as critical to animal welfare, reproductive behaviors – including mate choice – are generally overlooked. Mate choice behaviors, such as courtship and copulation, are not only highly motivated and rewarding but they also contribute to both proximate benefits, such as a sense of control, and ultimate benefits, such as access to resources, genetic fitness and reproductive success. However, captive environments often restrict the ability of animals to express mate choice, potentially leading to welfare issues. This review explores the relationship between mate choice and animal welfare through a review of the relevant literature. The findings demonstrated that courtship behaviors remained motivated even when copulation was not possible. Moreover, as courtship is important for evaluating partner quality and compatibility, the inability to court a preferred partner elicited stress which may ultimately result in reduced welfare. More indirectly, successful courtship with preferred partners correlated with higher reproductive success, suggesting that animals are more motivated to invest in offspring with preferred compared to non-preferred partners. In terms of copulation, species that naturally engage in frequent mating with several individuals often experienced lower welfare in captivity than species with a lower need for sexual behaviors. This difference may indicate that captive environments fail to meet the sexual needs of these animals, negatively impacting their welfare. Additionally, the ability to perform copulation behaviors and mating system may influence lifespan, as animals that were allowed to copulate and animals in monogamous mating systems lived longer than animals deprived from copulation and polygamous animals. Survival is not necessarily indicative of welfare yet it may suggest whether the captive environment fits the animal’s needs. Based on these findings, mate choice appears to be a key factor in shaping welfare outcomes for captive animals. Overall, this review highlights the need to integrate mate choice into welfare assessments in captive settings. For monogamous species, providing multiple potential partners may enhance welfare by enabling the selection of a compatible partner, and housing established pairs together may further support welfare outcomes. In contrast, promiscuous species should have sufficient mating options and variation in partners to align with their natural behaviors. This review underscores the importance of addressing existing welfare issues while remaining vigilant to other factors potentially influencing animal welfare. Future research should focus on incorporating direct welfare indicators, i.e. behavioral and physiological parameters, to further examine the link between mate choice and welfare within and across species.