New Year Honours for Dr Heather Bacon

We would like to wish all our friends, colleagues and supporters a very Happy New Year and every best wish for 2021.  For all of us 2020 has been a very difficult and trying year, so we are delighted to be able to kick 2021 off with some fantastic news: Heather Bacon, who has been with JMICAWE from the very beginning in 2011, has been given an OBE (Officer of the order of the British Empire) in the Queen’s New Year Honours list, in recognition of her work in veterinary education, animal welfare and charity work in the UK and abroad. 

This is one of the highest honours that can be bestowed on a UK citizen, and is a wonderful and very well deserved recognition of the enormous amount of work that Heather has done, and continues to do, in the service of animal welfare. There is not space here enough to do justice to everything that Heather has achieved, but this includes her work for the vet school in organising and delivering teaching to undergraduate veterinary students and postgraduate Masters
students in animal welfare in veterinary contexts, dog and cat behaviour and welfare, veterinary ethics and captive wild animal welfare. She has organised and delivered workshops and training in animal welfare, veterinary practice and ethics across Asia, including in China, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere, and plays a pivotal role in the development of online training materials for veterinary education in animal welfare and dog population management. 

Heather contributes to the work of the British Veterinary Association, Federation of Vets of Europe, and the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, including leading conference sessions and contributing to animal welfare publications.  She also works with many charities in the UK and overseas, including Animals Asia, Wild Welfare, DogStar, Fostering Compassion, the Bear Care Group, Dog’s Trust, and The Winton Foundation for the Welfare of Bears, often giving her specialist veterinary expertise in bear and zoo animal medicine and welfare for free. 

If this was not enough Heather is also a Defra-certified zoo animal welfare inspector, and has worked closely with the charity Animals Asia for many years both as their previous veterinary director, and more recently to deliver collaborative veterinary and zoo animal welfare education in Asia.

We feel very honoured to have Heather as part of the JMICAWE team. She has already received many other awards and recognition from the veterinary community for her work in animal welfare and we are delighted with this recognition of her achievements from her Majesty.   

Welcome to our new JMICAWE PhD Student - Lisa Qing Yang

The JMICAWE team is delighted to welcome new PhD student, Lisa Qing Yang, to the team. Lisa will be doing her PhD part time in China, focusing on poultry farmers and how higher welfare standards might be implemented in China. She is keen to understand how Chinese poultry farmers perceive their current practice on farms and to develop interventions to encourage better welfare practice. 

This project will be built on multidisciplinary knowledge and qualitative research methodologies. Before pursuing her PhD, Lisa obtained her master’s degrees in International Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law at the University of Edinburgh, Non-profit Organisations and Civil Society Studies at the University of Kent, and Applied Linguistics at Sichuan University in China.

Lisa says: ‘I learnt the term “animal welfare” for the first time in 2010, when I joined an international animal welfare organisation as a Public Relations Officer. During 10 years of working as an animal welfare advocate in China, I have developed a passion in raising awareness of animal welfare to the public and supporting captive animal facilities implementing higher animal welfare practices’.

Lisa has organised public events to communicate animal welfare knowledge with the public and facilitated different international workshops to build capacities of veterinarians, animal carers and academia in China. She currently works for an international consulting company to support conventional egg farmers to convert to cage-free systems in Asia. Before the role of consultant, she worked as the China Researcher Officer at Compassion in World Farming, a leading global farm animal welfare organisation.

Lisa engaged with various stakeholders in the livestock industry with technical expertise to help them improve their farming practices and achieve higher animal welfare standards, with a focus on poultry and pigs. Lisa’s experience of working with stakeholders in the animal- related industries sparked her interest in studying human behaviour change and driving farmers to change to higher welfare practice.

We are excited to have Lisa in the team, and to be able to apply her considerable skill set to improving the welfare of poultry in China.

Delivering workshops and visiting bears - China 2019

Heather and Jess have just returned from a successful trip to China where they collaborated with our long-term partners Animals Asia to deliver a 1 day animal behaviour and welfare seminar to around 60 participants and 2 days of veterinary skills training to veterinary surgeons from across Nanning. The workshop feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and the JMICAWE team look forward to building on this initial workshop with further activities and training events planned over the next three years.

We were also delighted to visit the Animals Asia rescue centres in Chengdu and Nanning – home to over 100 bears rescued from the trade in bear bile. As the previous veterinary director for Animals Asia, it was a great opportunity for heather to reconnect with some old furry friends and also to see the amazing work of Animals Asia continuing on. We were especially pleased to meet Jeanne, a bear rescued from a Nanning bear farm and named in memory of Jeanne Marchig, the benefactor of our own animal welfare centre here at the R(D)SVS.

The Crate Escape – Dog Trafficking in the News

Scottish readers may have spotted JMICAWE’s Heather Bacon in the Sunday Mail at the end of last month, as she was asked to give an interview on the dog meat trade in Asia which has hit the international headlines recently following the Yulin Festival earlier in the year. Heather has witnessed first-hand some of the practices that go on in Asia to obtain, transport and kill these dogs, and was asked to talk about it after a report was released by our partner Animals Asia on the illegal dog meat trade.

You may recognise Heather and Hayley’s own dogs, Stewart, Mothi and Matilda (pictured below) who were rescued from the dog meat trade when Heather and Hayley worked over in Asia a few years ago.

You can read the full article by clicking on this link;

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/scots-vet-fight-free-dogs-6140300

 

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