AWES holds their 4th Annual Veterinary Welfare and Ethics Conference

The Animal Welfare and Ethics Society (AWES), a student-led society part of the R(D)SVS, have just held their 4th annual conference virtually this year. The topics spanned from ethical dilemmas of treating British Wildlife, pain management in small animal practice, to the role of vets in forensics. 

Below is a reflection by the conference organiser Yuko Okumura: 

The conference started in 2017 with Morgan Brown, a fourth year student, who wanted to provide a platform for active discussion and dialogue around veterinary ethical dilemmas. Her main goal was to better equip students once they were practicing vets and prepare them for the potential challenging welfare issues they would face.  Morgan wanted the conference to be accessible, and from the start, had aimed to keep the conference affordable.  

Whilst the virtual world certainly has its challenges, it also offered AWES an opportunity this year to welcome international speakers for the first time. We were able to reach delegates like never before - from both UK and international vet students, staff, and animal care professionals. Some such speakers were an animal welfare lecturer from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, a dog groomer, and a vet from Australia, to name a few. 

As with our previous conferences, we aimed to cover various species groups (farm, equine, small animals, exotics) and were able to welcome experts of each field. These experts ranged from but were not limited to: the technical director of the Humane Slaughter Association, a board member of the Michigan Horse Welfare Coalition, and the co-director of Human Behaviour Change for Animals. The conference also tried to take on a holistic approach to discuss how society and human attitudes continually shape animal welfare, the importance of the welfare of the vet, and an evaluation on the Scientific Procedures Act from a legislative perspective.  

One of the talks that resonated with me personally was the discussion on farm animal welfare by Dr. Matt Dobbs from the Animal Welfare Foundation. Matt spoke with passion about how as young vets, awareness alone was not enough; that we would have to feel empowered enough to be active drivers of change.

He emphasised our duty to call out and question long-held beliefs within this industry, to constantly challenge our own understanding and knowledge about animal welfare and ethics and doing so through evidence-based research. These sentiments most certainly resonate with the aims and objectives JMICAWE strives to do on a daily basis.

If you would like to watch the recordings from the conference- register here: 

https://forms.gle/NP6r5Eb9cSesnim98

More information about the conference and the AWES society can be found on our website: 

https://www.animalwelfareandethicssociety.com/2021-virtual-conference

JMICAWE spends a year Working From Home!

Bluebell (Director Cathy Dwyer's dog)
playing in the snow. 

We have just reached a milestone that no one expected or wanted – it is now a whole year since the JMICAWE team packed up our bags, plants and coffee mugs, said goodbye and headed off to work from home in the light of the pandemic, never expecting that we would still not be back in the office a year later! 

Whilst we all remain healthy, thankfully, and are blessed that we are able to carry on working from our homes via Teams, Zoom and every other means of communicating, it has been a difficult time for many. Most of the JMICAWE team have been relying on our pets for comfort – whether that is dog walking, riding horses or enjoying a cuddle with the cats that occasionally make an intervention into the Team meetings. So we are all appreciative of the benefits to our mental health and well-being that our pets bring. 

However, it is also important that we remember to take care of our pet’s welfare too, so it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Of increasing concern is that the high demand for puppies during the pandemic has created the perfect opportunity for unscrupulous breeders to offer puppies, often at very high prices, that have come from puppy farming backgrounds. 

As it is currently not possible to visit the puppy at home with its mother, it is harder than ever for buyers to be able to check that their prospective new puppies have had a proper start in life, and the mother has been properly taken care of. A number of charities in the UK have put together a resource that is designed to help UK buyers be assured that their puppies and parents have been kept under good conditions: https://puppycontract.org.uk/. You can also find more resources about Covid and pet welfare on the JMICAWE website here: https://www.ed.ac.uk/vet/jeanne-marchig-centre/covid-animals

Perhaps you have not been able to work from home and have time on your hands, or are considering a change in career? Whilst we have not been able to do our usual travelling and visits to run workshops etc, the JMICAWE team has been hard at work creating online resources to support animal welfare education, often in collaboration with others. We have worked with Wild Welfare to create an educational resource looking at welfare of c
aptive wildlife, and have developed our own resources to support veterinary nursing students. 

We have worked with the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India to develop a postgraduate distance learning course on animal welfare which launched last year, and has an amazing 850 students on the course. We are also working with University of Queensland and collaborators in China to develop a course on animal welfare for students in China. And our Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are still freely available and continue to be very popular. You can find out more about all our activities by signing up for our newsletter, following us on social media, and checking out our courses and resources on our webpage: https://www.ed.ac.uk/vet/jeanne-marchig-centre. Lastly, we hope to be able to meet up again in person very soon, but until then we hope to be able to keep you entertained and educated in animal welfare via other means.

Bird-brains or Chicken Einsteins? The truth about poultry cognitive abilities

Bird-Brains: Celebrating Poultry Day

Chickens are often overlooked and misunderstood. The term “bird-brain” is often used as an insult amongst us humans! However, a chicken’s brain (like all bird brains), is highly  complex with impressive cognitive abilities. They might be the most consumed terrestrial meat on the planet, with nearly 70 billion chickens processed for human consumption every year, but most people will never get the opportunity to get to know a chicken and spend time with them. Chickens have been shown to be emotional and intelligent, with some similar cognitive capacities to pigs, dogs and primates.

Chickens are emotional beings and science has shown us they are able to express depression after an injury and aspects of maternal empathy when their chicks become distressed. They can also do basic maths from a young age, performing addition and subtraction of coloured objects. Furthermore, they can demonstrate self-control and will choose to wait for longer periods in order to get the best rewards. Anyone who has spent time with chickens know they are chatty birds and science has documented over twenty different vocalisations they use to communicate. Even more impressive is that each of their vocals (e.g., calls, whistles, peeps, etc.) actually convey information, which references specific cues in their environment. For example, they have different alarm calls for different predators! Chickens can also deceive each other in order to gain the upper hand in social contexts - for example males will fake food calls in order to attract females, but females have also learnt to ignore males which food call too often!

It’s fair to say there is much more to chickens than the simplified “bird-brain” image. Students who have been given the opportunity to spend time with chickens and train them with positive clicker-training methods are reported to be surprised in how bright chickens can be. Knowing all that we do about the cognitive and emotional capabilities of chickens it might be time to re-think the term “bird-brain”!

If this has stimulated your interest to learn more about chickens, you can also take our MOOC in chicken behaviour and welfare here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/chickens

Blog Post by Dr Jessica Martin

Hayley Walters speaks to Royal Veterinary College, London

JMICAWE’s veterinary nurse Hayley Walters was requested by rival vet school The Royal Veterinary College, London, to speak to their student veterinary nurses who are close to graduating.

Hayley was delighted to have been personally chosen by the students to talk about the opportunities veterinary nurses have once qualified. Hayley has spent a large portion of her career working overseas in low to middle income countries either in the charity sector or teaching and it was on this that she was talking.

 

Developing countries face many challenges in veterinary education and care and Hayley was keen to ensure that the students understood why these challenges exist in order to better prepare them should they choose to work overseas. Religious, cultural, and economical reasons, plus drug availability all play their part in a  different experience in veterinary education and care and it is important that this is understood in order to not only be helpful when working in overseas projects, but also not to offend anybody. Hayley said -  

“British veterinary nurses are trained to a high standard. Many of our skills are easily transferable to other species and, with a little bit of thinking outside the box when necessary, is valuable in situations where funds and resources may be limited.”

 

Hayley was inundated with questions at the end regarding which charities to choose to work for so stressed that students do their research before going to ensure the charity is legitimate, the charity requests you are a veterinary nurse, and has good standards of animal welfare.

International Women’s Day, 8th March 2021

 For the 2021 International Women’s Day we are delighted to celebrate the contribution that women have made to animal welfare, veterinary medicine, and One Welfare. The theme of this year’s International Women’s day is #ChooseToChallenge. This is so relevant to the work that many women do, and especially to those of us who work to improve animal welfare. So often we need to choose to challenge the status quo in animal management, to raise our voices to ask questions about whether this is the best approach for animals, and to remind others that animal lives matter too. In the past, and maybe still in the present, we risk being labelled as ‘fluffy’ or ‘bunny-huggers’ or a range of other derogative comments by those who do not want to consider that animals may be sentient and that actions towards them may cause suffering.

However, women have had a long history of challenging current thinking and practices to improve animal welfare. The book of a 19th Century novelist, Anna Sewell, about the life of a horse, Black Beauty, challenged the ways that horses were treated when horses were providing traction power everywhere, and argued for the ethical treatment of animals. In the early 1900s Dorothy Brooke was horrified at the treatment of ex-British army horses abandoned in Egypt and challenged the status quo by rescuing many horses and founding the charity The Brooke. In 1952 Rukmuni Devi Arundale was the first woman to be nominated to the Indian Parliament’s Council of States, and a passionate advocate of animal welfare, founding the Animal Welfare Board of India in 1962. Rachel Carson, a marine biologist from the US, is credited with advancing the global environmental movement through her book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, which brought arguments about conservation and environmentalism to the general public for the first time. And in 1964 Ruth Harrison wrote a pivotal book, Animal Machines, which exposed to the public the practices in modern livestock farming, and sparked a whole field of animal welfare science, and animal welfare legislation in the UK and beyond. Each of these women challenged the current thinking and practices, and showed that there could be another way. 

As more women become veterinary professionals and animal welfare scientists, and more women are engaged in working to improve animal welfare, we stand on the shoulders of these giants in choosing to challenge way animals are treated and working to make a difference for animal lives.

We thank you all.

Recognising the importance of wildlife welfare for World Wildlife Day

Wednesday 3rd March marks the 2021 World Wildlife Day (https://www.wildlifeday.org/), which this year will celebrate forest-based livelihoods and seeks to promote forest and forest wildlife management for people, animals and the planet. The aim is to promote a sustainable future for humans, forests and forest-dwelling wildlife species, recognising the need for practices that protect these crucial natural systems.

Here at JMICAWE we have had a long term focus on the welfare of wildlife, whether these are free-living or captive, recognising our responsibilities to ensure that they are protected and to consider where veterinary medicine can play a role in their welfare. As we are all aware with the current pandemic, the relationships between ourselves and wildlife are tightly intertwined in ensuring the health of the planet and those who live on it. JMICAWE vet, Dr Heather Bacon, is an expert in bear and zoo animal medicine, and is involved with several groups and organisations to help promote wildlife welfare. She has contributed to workshops on the welfare of bears and other captive wildlife, including conducting the world’s first ultrasound pregnancy diagnosis of a pangolin, one of the most trafficked animals in the world. In collaboration with Wild Welfare, JMICAWE has developed an accessible and interactive digital resource ‘Wild about Welfare’ to help promote the welfare of captive wildlife through a focus on good husbandry and meeting an animal’s welfare needs (https://wildwelfare.org/uk-charity-tackles-global-animal-welfare-issues-with-digital-education-programme/ or https://www.ed.ac.uk/vet/jeanne-marchig-centre/cpd/wild-welfare).

JMICAWE director, Prof Cathy Dwyer, also chairs the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission, which has a remit to consider the welfare of free-living wildlife in Scotland. The Commission has just published a report on the welfare of wild deer in Scotland (https://www.gov.scot/publications/management-of-wild-deer-scottish-animal-welfare-commission-response/), and is currently considering the welfare of beavers, and the welfare implications of the management of wild rodents. Both Heather and Cathy will be speakers at the forthcoming Wild Animal Welfare Committee conference on 19th April, which will address the topic: Wild Animal Welfare: Does it matter? Can it be assessed? How can it be optimised? See https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8028284674528591630 for more information and to register for the conference.