JMICAWE India travels - Animal Welfare Workshop in Bangalore

Workshop on animal behaviour and welfare in Bangalore

JMICAWE Director, Cathy Dwyer, and the coordinator of the MSc programme in Applied Animal Behaviour and Welfare (University of Edinburgh), Kirstin McIlvaney, have just returned from a trip to the Veterinary College in Bangalore (Karnataka Veterinary, Animal and Fisheries Science University) where they ran a 3 day workshop on animal welfare and behaviour hosted by Dr Abdul Rahman and the Commonwealth Veterinary Association.

This was part of the work that JMICAWE are doing to capacity-build in Indian vet schools, and to support the new Animal Welfare Research Centre based in the vet school in Bangalore.  The workshop was attended by about 40 postgraduate students and faculty from 9 different vet schools across India. Cathy and Kirstin focused on animal welfare sciences, and particularly animal behaviour measurements. 

After a day in the classroom the workshop went out to visit the poultry and dairy facilities on site to practice their animal behaviour data collection skills. Half the group went with Kirstin to the poultry facility, where they compared the benefits of scan and focal sampling and discussed how they might use different techniques to address different issues. The other half of the group went with Cathy to the dairy unit where we looked at the importance of good ethograms, and piloting data collection methods, and had an attempt at conducting an on farm novel object test, based on previous methods used in the UK. We ended the workshop with discussion of teaching approaches to animal welfare, and exploring different teaching resources that were available.

Some of these resources are freely available and can be found on line at JMICAWE by following this link: https://www.ed.ac.uk/vet/jeanne-marchig-centre/cpd   

Delivering workshops and visiting bears - China 2019

Heather and Jess have just returned from a successful trip to China where they collaborated with our long-term partners Animals Asia to deliver a 1 day animal behaviour and welfare seminar to around 60 participants and 2 days of veterinary skills training to veterinary surgeons from across Nanning. The workshop feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and the JMICAWE team look forward to building on this initial workshop with further activities and training events planned over the next three years.

We were also delighted to visit the Animals Asia rescue centres in Chengdu and Nanning – home to over 100 bears rescued from the trade in bear bile. As the previous veterinary director for Animals Asia, it was a great opportunity for heather to reconnect with some old furry friends and also to see the amazing work of Animals Asia continuing on. We were especially pleased to meet Jeanne, a bear rescued from a Nanning bear farm and named in memory of Jeanne Marchig, the benefactor of our own animal welfare centre here at the R(D)SVS.