Hayley Walters delivers webinar for MSAVA

JMICAWE’s veterinary nurse, Hayley Walters, was invited by the Malaysian Small Animal Veterinary Association (MSAVA) to deliver a webinar to its members and non members last week. The topic was ‘Maintaining welfare standards during hospitalisation’ and was attended by over 170 delegates. 

Hayley talked about how to handle, examine, and house cats and dogs in the most positive ways possible in the clinic, thereby reducing stress for the patient, and considering their veterinary experience from the animal’s perspective. 

Hayley also covered how welfare can be improved in each section of the clinic the animal moves through, understanding dog body language and what you might see before a dog has to bite, and how to recognise and score pain in cats and dogs. 

Hayley said, 

“So much emphasis is placed on the physical health of an animal when being treated in the clinic and whilst that IS important, it shouldn’t be our only focus. We cannot break animals down to their biological values and thought needs to be given to their emotional state. Fear and stress are detrimental to an animal’s health and there are many simple, practical steps we can put in place to mitigate this and ensure their time in the clinic is as positive as possible.”

Hayley received many questions after her webinar and looks forward to working with MSAVA again in the future. 

New Video: Dog Welfare in Trap-Neuter-Return Programmes

We're very excited to announce the launch of our new video on YouTube, created in partnership with the Dog's Trust.

The Dog's Trust awarded the JMICAWE a grant to investigate dog welfare in Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programmes. This method is advocated by animal welfare organisations and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). However, with high targets for the TNR programmes in many countries, we need to ensure that we are not putting individual dog welfare at risk in order to achieve population control.

In this video, Heather Bacon, our Veterinary Welfare Education and Outreach manager talks about some of the work we've been doing with the Dog's Trust to understand and measure welfare in a TNR programme.

As Heather says, dog population management is a global issue. A good TNR programme will protect dog populations by improving their health, their relationships with the human community and controlling their population size. But a good TNR programme also needs to consider the use of welfare measures to monitor dog welfare while they are going through the programme.