30 years of the MSc in Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare at the University of Edinburgh/SRUC

On World Animal Day on the 4^th Oct 2021 we held an online event to celebrate 30 years of the MSc in Applied Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare. The MSc turned 30 in 2020 and after a couple of false starts we managed to pull together the event a year late in 2021. The afternoon event consisted of talks, interviews and short videos from staff and graduates of the programme from across the years. In this guest blog, Programme Director, Dr Tamsin Coombs, tells us about the activities she organised for the day:

We started proceedings with Professor Alistair Lawrence who reminisced on the early planning of the MSc with very interesting excerpts from documents taken from his extensive archive (in his garage!)  before taking us all the way through to the present day and looking forward to the next 30 years of animal welfare education. This was then followed by talks by Alick Simmons from the very first cohort in 1990 (Developments in animal welfare policy over the past 30 years), Dr Matt Leach, class of 1995-96 (Recent advances in assessing pain in non-human animals) and Professor Vicky Melfi, class of 1996-97 (Zoo animal welfare since 1997).

We then started the next session with an interview with Professor Nat Waran who took us back to the early days of both the MSc and JMICAWE. She shared fascinating insights from her time as the first coordinator and then successor to Professor David Wood-Gush as programme director of the MSc and then the first Director of JMICAWE. This was then followed by talks from two graduates from the class of 1999 – 2000, Dr Sam Gaines who now works for the RSPCA (Twenty years of dog welfare- the good, the bad and the ugly) and our own Dr Fritha Langford, programme director for the MSc in International Animal welfare, Ethics and Law (A case study in where AABAW can take you). Next I interviewed Kim Wells who was in the same 2006-07 cohort of students as I was and has worked at Brooke, Action for working horses and donkeys, ever since her graduation in 2007. We then finished up with a talk, on how retailers use science to improve animal welfare on their farms, from Matt Turner (class of 2009-10) and who now works in Animal Health and Welfare at Sainsbury’s supermarkets.

These main talks were interspersed by short videos, photos and quotes from other graduates of the programme who got back in touch to tell us about what they gained from the MSc and what they are doing now. We have graduates working in research and teaching around the world; undertaking PhD’s; working for NGO’s and animal welfare organisations; and working in zoos to name but a few. We were also able to showcase some of the many scientific papers that have come about because of research undertaken during the dissertation element of the MSc which also highlights the impact on animal welfare science of the programme.

And to quote Professor Alistair Lawrence after the event: 

“what a great day – it was a real celebration – quite moving really – I am sure David (Wood-Gush) would be chuffed to bits – I can see him smiling with pleasure at what has been achieved and how much of a difference the course has made”