Activities and research programmes in the AWSBC
Current activities
- Developing practical solutions to welfare problems.
- Evaluating husbandry practices and systems.
- Developing efficient and acceptable methods of pest control.
- Preparing livestock industry and other animal welfare codes.
- Devising and validating parameters for animal welfare assessment.
- Preparing reports and analyses for clients.
- Teaching animal welfare sciences, applied animal behaviour and ethics.
- Analysing ethical dimensions of welfare problems and technological developments.
Anticipated future trends
- Rising international concern for production animal welfare.
- Rising market demands for livestock welfare certification.
- Rising international concern for wildlife welfare.
- Rising interest in fish welfare.
- Animal-human interactions and welfare increasingly emphasised in research.
- Animal cognition increasingly emphasised in welfare thinking.
- Ethical concern about medical application of animal-derived biotechnology.
- Rising public interest in the ethics of all animal-human interactions.
Specific areas of research
- Behaviour scoring and predicting welfare outcomes in livestock
- Behavioural indices of motivation, temperament and welfare states in animals
- Behavioural assessment of dog-sheep and human-sheep interactions
- Brain developmental stage and the welfare of in ovo and newly hatched birds
- Brain developmental stage and welfare precautions in fetal and newborn mammals
- Comparative neurobiological development and animal welfare
- Pregnancy stress and lamb survival and welfare
- Further development and use of humane pain research models
- Re-evaluation of routine euthanasia methods
- Husbandry pain and novel alleviation strategies in farm livestock
- Stress and its alleviation during non-painful husbandry procedures
- Canine behaviour and pound/shelter management
- Impact of human attitudes, experience and knowledge on dog and horse behaviour
- Matching guide dogs and visually impaired people
- Positive welfare states: the experience of pleasure in animals
