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.