Animal Welfare Day 2019

Exploring Animal Sentience for World Animal Day 

World Animal Day falls on 4^th October each year and its purpose is to improve animal welfare standards around the globe, through celebrating the lives of animals. The mission of World Animal Day is to make the world a better place for animals, which fits very well with the JMICAWE mission and aims. Every two years, with our partner SRUC, JMICAWE have been involved in helping to organise an event around this date, to celebrate animal welfare. This year, we also linked up with our BioResearch vets to cover animals used in science as well as other animals. As our theme this year we focused on ‘Animal sentience and emotions’ and why that is so important in our thinking about animal welfare. We were delighted to be able to welcome 200 staff and students from local campuses to the event.

We began with a morning of talks from researchers from SRUC, the French research institute (INRA) and University of Newcastle. Our first speaker, Professor Francoise Wemelsfelder from SRUC, reminded us about animal ethics and why sentience and emotions should be at the forefront of our thinking and assessments of animal welfare. Next Professor Marie Haskell (SRUC) showed us the fascinating abilities of farm animals to recognise emotions in faces, and why faces are so important for animals.

 Professor Marie Haskell (SRUC) defines emotions

We then had a series of presentations on positive emotions in animals – such as play, positive engagement, contentment and use of enrichment. Dr Belinda Vigors shared the outcomes of some of her work in exploring these concepts with farmers, and it was great to see how important farmers felt these positive emotions were to the lives of farmed animals. Professor Alistair Lawrence then expanded on the theme of positive animal welfare, including showing a wonderful video of rats engaging in hide-and-seek play with researchers – what a great thing to be able to call work! A visiting researcher, Dr Vincent Bombail from INRA, then continued this theme with a talk about tickling rats and assessing their vocal responses. Finally our morning programme ended with a talk by Dr Matt Leach of Newcastle University about the very important emotion of pain and how it can be recognised in animals.

As is becoming a tradition with these events we had a long lunch break to allow delegates to network and find out more about animal welfare research including the use of 3D video imaging to detect animal behaviour on farm, training tools for farmers on body condition scoring of cows, and a peek at the new large animal imagining facility, including MRI. For the afternoon we had a really interesting talk from about the use of animals in science from Elliott Lilley of RSPCA and concluded with a panel discussion on animal sentience and how that might affect use of animals in science. 

Overall the feedback on the event was very positive, and we look forward to organising the next one in 2021! 

Animal Welfare Day 8th October in Edinburgh

Scientists from Scotland’s Rural College are inviting secondary school children from across Scotland to join them for a virtual discussion on how best to care for our animals. The animal welfare experts will be online on Friday 2 October at 1pm and school classes can join them by using Google+ Hangout or through YouTube.

Hangout organiser Dr Jill MacKay explains: “Animal welfare is now a part of the higher biology curriculum so this is a great chance for students to discuss the key issues such as disease, hunger and distress with scientists at the forefront of animal welfare research. Students can email or tweet questions in advance and then watch our researchers answer them on a live feed.”

The event has been organised to celebrate 50 years since a significant report on livestock welfare which highlighted need for scientific methods of assessing animal welfare and called for better more consistent care. As the report is a foundation stone of modern day animal welfare research, the scientists will also discuss the journey from that publication to modern day animal welfare science and what lies in store in the years ahead.

Students or teachers who want to join the hang out or find out more should email jill.mackay@sruc.ac.uk. They can also send her questions for the scientists or tweet them to @SRUCResearch using the #Freedoms50 hashtag.

 

G+ Event Page: https://goo.gl/kIYIuz

YouTube Direct Link: http://goo.gl/01IZXs