Delphi Workshop in Edinburgh

Delphi Workshop

At the beginning of September, we held our Delphi study workshop in Edinburgh. This was a very exciting milestone for us as it was the final step of the project, and the first time that we had any of our animal welfare experts all together in one place.

Prior to the workshop, we recruited almost 150 experts within 10 different species groups (cats, dogs, horses, rabbits, exotics, wildlife, cattle, pigs, sheep/goats, and poultry). Our animal welfare experts were a mixture of researchers, veterinarians, charity sector, industry, and government/policy. We asked all of them to complete two online surveys with the intention of ranking extensive animal welfare lists according to three different criteria: severity, duration, and prevalence. We then invited a sub-section of our experts, 20 in total, to come to Edinburgh for the workshop.

The purpose of the workshop was to ask our experts to work together during 2 days of activities and discussions to try and come up with a final list of priority welfare issues for each species, as well as an overall list of priority welfare issues for managed animals in the UK. No mean feat!

Despite the incredibly difficult nature of the task, we were very pleased with how well all of our experts worked together, and the interesting discussions that arose along the way. Remarkably, we were able to reach consensus on the final lists for all 10 groups. The final results of the workshop, and study as a whole, will be presented to our project funders, the Animal Welfare Foundation, by the end of November, and will also be published in several peer-reviewed journals. We will be sure to share these links with everyone when they become publicly available.

Thanks again to all of our fantastic experts.

Fiona C Rioja-Lang