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This year, two members of our Animal Behaviour and Welfare Research Group (Dr Holly Vickery and Dr Ellen Williams), working with the Engaging for Change group lead, Professor David Rose, hosted an Animal Welfare Research Network funded workshop and then the great honour of hosting an evening seminar with Professor Donald Broom. Holly and Ellen have shared their thoughts on the day below.

The launched in 2016. It aims to bring together the UK animal welfare research community. The clue is very much in the name but one of the key aspects of the AWRN is to provide a platform for colleagues in the animal welfare sphere to work together on some of the most important areas of research within animal welfare. The network regularly advertise funding for workshops. Whilst these all take different approaches, a key element of them is supporting collaboration and meaningful discussions that can strengthen the field of Animal Welfare science.

We were lucky enough to successfully be awarded funding by the AWRN to host a workshop at ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ in March on Participatory Engagement in Animal Welfare science.

Whilst engaging with people in order to improve animal welfare has long been of importance to the Animal Behaviour and Welfare Research group at Harper Adams, this has recently been strengthened with the establishment of the ‘Engaging for Change’ research group. The Animal Behaviour and Welfare group (under the Animal Science Research Centre) have been working closely with David’s new group, in collaboration with the new wider Centre for Social Science, to utilise more social science techniques in our research. This new collaboration was the inspiration for the theme of our workshop.

The aim of the day was to bring together social scientists, industry, and animal welfare scientists to increase knowledge of how social and animal science techniques can be aligned to foster increased collaborations and produce research with greater potential for real-world impact.

When planning the day we decided we wanted to focus on having a series of talks from experts in the area, to inspire fruitful discussions later on. We had incredible support from the animal welfare community and  a brilliant line up of invited speakers: Professor David Rose, Professor Emma Roe, Dr Tamzin Furtado and Dr Heather Browning. We wanted the speakers to each bring something different to the table and to consider the multifaceted and complex topic of participatory engagement from the point of view of humans and animals.

Professor David Rose started the day with a brief introduction to the topic, stressing the need to help researchers from all disciplines work together to embed social science techniques for the substantive engagement of humans and non-humans in co-designing research. Social science is not just useful for adoption and human behaviour change – but also helps to fundamentally open up questions about animal welfare to incorporate different cultural perspectives and interrogate both opportunities and risks of change.

Professor David Rose opening the AWRN workshop

Professor Emma Roe then talked about her work as a Professor in More-Than-Human Geographies who has experience working across various animal industries.

Professor Emma Roe, our second speaker of the day

Her use of creative activities such as making a model or a to open discussions was fascinating and something many of us will now be trying out!

An example of some of the exciting crafting activities which Professor Emma Roe has utilised within her work

Dr Tamzin Furtado focused on techniques to elicit Human Behaviour change - and an approach to tackle equine obesity which found that rosettes were a rather powerful motivating force for horse owners, and had us all pondering what might motivate the people we work with. Understanding motivation is really important, particularly where the research you are undertaking, or the outputs you wish to achieve, require some level of human behaviour change.

Dr Tamzin Furtado discussing the effectiveness of behavioural interventions

Dr Heather Browning completed our invited speaker talks with a philosopher's perspective and discussed how animals can be included as participants, with a really interesting perspective on 'assent' versus 'consent'. Whilst animals may not be able to truly give ‘informed consent’ - that is, to voluntarily agree to partake in research based on a full understanding of the benefits and possible consequences - they may be able to ‘assent’ if we provide conditions which enable them to make a choice whether or not to engage in a particular process, with the costs and benefits being made as clear as possible (e.g. the cost is moving to an area the animal may be less familiar with but the benefit is a desired food reward).

Dr Heather Browning, our final speaker of the day, identifying who she believes to be stakeholders in research

More information on the speakers themselves can be found in our previous blog post.  

After the talks we split into discipline-focused groups to discuss the opportunities for, and barriers to, different engagement techniques within various human and animal groups. On the day we were joined by delegates both online and in-person who were from a range of disciplines including farmed animals, zoo/exotic animals, equine and companion animals.

Our first task was to think about who - or what -  stakeholders are across the different disciplines. This was a bigger task than many of us anticipated, with this discussion leading to the acknowledgement that there are a wide range of animal- and human-stakeholders within the field of animal welfare, all of whom are likely to have different priorities. Once stakeholders were decided the groups were tasked with discussing strategies they have used for engaging stakeholders and also considering any challenges (and how they have previously overcome those challenges).

It quickly became apparent that this was a very big and important discussion topic, with lots of really interesting discussions being had across the different groups.

Stakeholders encompassed the animals themselves, people working with the animals (in varying proximities; from hands-on regular contact to infrequent or non-direct interactions) right through to people who just had a passing interest in the animal.

Challenges varied across the different groups but none of them were insurmountable with well-planned research that holds participatory engagement principles at its core. Understanding challenges and perspectives of all of the relevant stakeholders and ensuring they have clear inputs into project design was, we decided, of particular importance.

We were extremely grateful to our wonderful and very varied attendees for such important discussions with lots of new thoughts for us to ponder, and to all of our facilitators (online and in-person) who tried to keep the discussions on topic! We hope to be able to create a summary document of those discussions in the not too distant future, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Professor Donald (Don) Broom talked about the changes that have been seen in the last 25 years within the field of Animal Welfare, with a talk entitled ‘Progress since Coping with Challenge: Welfare in Animals including Humans'. When he was appointed in 1986, he was the world’s first Professor of Animal Welfare – and he went on to be one of the most influential figures in discipline. We were absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to host him.  

During his talk Don reflected upon the leaps forward we have made in the animal welfare world since he started, most notably moving from not recognising that animals may have welfare needs and requirements through to seeing animals as sentient and considering what their affective state (an emotions and feelings based approach to animal welfare assessment) may be!

Reflecting on the day, Dr Holly Vickery said: "It is incredible to think that Don was the world's first Professor of animal welfare and when he first started out Animal Welfare Science was laughed at by animal scientists! I am so grateful for his insights and the path he carved for so many of us within this field. It was an absolute privilege to host him."

From left to right: Dr Ellen Williams, Professor Donald Broom, Dr Holly Vickery (Photo credit: David Rose)

We are sure there will continue to be many more significant changes within this field in the future and we really hope that the ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ Animal Behaviour and Welfare Research Group will have an opportunity to be a part of that!

f you’re interested in collaborating on research projects around this area, particularly if you are in industry and are looking for academic support, please do reach out to us via email.

The recordings of the talks from the day are available to AWRN members and can be found here. If you are not a member of the AWRN but are interested in the talks then please see their for further details on how to join – membership is free and we thoroughly recommend it!