Animal Welfare teaching under review at R(D)SVS

Here at the R(D)SVS we’ve seen an increase in both the animal behaviour and animal welfare teaching delivered to our undergraduate veterinary students over the last five years. Building on the expectations of the BVA’s animal welfare strategy and BVA/RCVS ‘Vet Futures’ report, we have recently reviewed the teaching delivered to ensure that we’re equipping our ‘future vets’ with the best possible animal welfare, ethics and behaviour teaching.

To this end, and with the support of the Learning and Teaching committee, we’ll be setting up a committee to further explore the teaching that we deliver in these subject areas, as well as evaluating our ‘hidden’ curriculum to ensure that as much as possible we ‘practice what we teach’.

We’re very excited about revamping our curriculum in this challenging and expanding field of scientific enquiry, and are grateful to the staff and students at the R(D)SVS that are supporting this venture. Heather Bacon at JMICAWE, who is leading the project, said “ For years in veterinary teaching,  animal welfare and ethics has been delivered as a ‘stand-alone’ subject, often covering quite ‘dry’ aspects of science, whilst animal behaviour is often under-taught despite this being an area that almost all vets in practice will need to advise on. By taking an integrated approach, we hope to make these subjects as clinically relevant and consistent as possible throughout our curriculum, empowering our students with the clinical reasoning and ethical decision-making skills to engage in this often tricky subject area.”