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

Camels in Canada

Camels in Canada

I was delighted to be supported by JMICAWE to attend the 2018 Congress of the International Society for Applied Ethology (ISAE) in Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada. Its organisation was led by Professor Michael Cockram (previously of Edinburgh Vet School) at the University of PEI, on the outskirts of Charlottetown. Campus, town and indeed the whole island are pretty, and the lovely weather while we were there made the whole event – conference, side events and tours – a thoroughly enjoyable occasion.

That was helped by the famous friendliness of ISAE, and I have been glad to play some small part in that as a member of Council, including at the Council meeting (my last, as my term has now finished), at the AGM, and wherever else appropriate, such as during the traditionally enthusiastic dancing after the congress banquet. The conference’s scientific programme was also consistently high in quality, and I played my part in conferring, too. Indeed, I was doubtless in the category identified by our President Bas Rodenburg in his opening remarks as People who Frequently Ask Questions. His point was to encourage others to participate as well, and that was successfully achieved. An innovation of recent years has been ‘Eating with Ethologists,’ which arranges for students to share lunch tables with senior scientists of their choice. I greatly enjoyed this, and the students I met then and at other times were also enthusiastic about the opportunities for communication, both scientific and personal. I was glad throughout the meeting to represent Edinburgh and our work on welfare education for vets and others.

Finally, I gave the closing talk of the congress, with the title ‘On the ubiquity and utility of camels.’ This was a light-hearted look at the striking frequency with which animals appear in our everyday idioms: for example, ‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back.’ Yet this also reminds us of the importance of animals in our cultures, round the world and through the ages, and of understanding their behaviour and protecting their welfare for both their benefit and ours.

Mike Appleby