ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ

By Ellen Williams, Laura Pannewitz, Holly Vickery, Malgorzata Behnke and Shweta Trivedi

The Animal Behaviour and Welfare Research Group engages in lots of different activities alongside the more ‘traditional’ research related activities - including hosting workshops and short courses.

ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ has a long-standing relationship with North Carolina State University.

Every summer we host a two-week training course for their prospective veterinary science students, which is organised by Dr Malgorzata Behnke, one of our group members and an equine researcher.

NCSU students have been coming to ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ with Dr Shweta Trivedi and her colleagues since 2018. The aim of this study abroad programme is to provide the students with experience within the fields of animal behaviour and veterinary physiotherapy, provide additional credits for their applications to Veterinary School and provide an opportunity for students to visit the UK and experience some of our sites and culture.

A key part of this fortnight is its practical and applied nature – we try to give them as many opportunities to learn new skills as possible.

Dr Trivedi said: "I truly believe in providing hands-on international animal and veterinary experiences for my students and Harper Adams has been a very strategic partner. An increasing number of my students are interested in animal behavior and physiotherapy but the experiential opportunities are very limited."

This is where the course at Harper comes into its own! The students have a packed two weeks which is roughly split into one week of Veterinary Physiotherapy - including anatomy, healing, biomechanics and hydrotherapy - and one week of Animal Behaviour and Welfare.

The Animal Behaviour and Welfare content includes animal learning theory, animal handling, methods of assessing behaviour and assessing animal environments. The students get to spend time in our Companion Animal House, at The Equine Yard and at The Future Farm ,focusing on cows and pigs.

This year four of our group got to be involved in teaching: Dr Ellen Williams, Dr Holly Vickery, Jennifer Sadler and Laura Pannewitz.

Ellen took them for a brief introduction to animal behaviour and animal learning theory, and then assessing animal behaviour.

The animal learning theory practical included a serious test of patience when they were tasked with training a virtual rat called Sniffy. is a great way to model animal learning theories, without causing excess stress to real animals. The students need to train sniffy tasks using a reward based system. But Sniffy isn’t as forgiving as real animals so the students need to be mindful of their timing and what behaviour they are actually reinforcing - it is very easy to reinforce the wrong thing by delaying the provision of the reward! It’s sometimes frustrating but a great lesson for the students in patience and timing – something we all do well to remember.   

Training Sniffy!

The assessing animal behaviour session involves a jam-packed day at the Companion Animal House that was delivered by Ellen, Jen and the Companion Animal House staff. It included: a unit tour, reviewing an enclosure and considering the behaviour of the animals in the enclosure, preference tests for gerbils and novel object tests for rats. This day is always lots of fun as students get to spend time with the animals, whilst learning common tests which are useful in building behavioural profiles of the animals.

A student putting one of the gerbils into the preference test Y maze

As one of our equine specialists, Laura took the students for a session on equine behaviour and handling.

During these sessions the students had opportunities to learn safe and ethical ways to handle, restrain and lead a horse; assess the impact of housing and management on horses and observe horse body language in their interactions with humans and other horses – absolutely essential for welfare-friendly equine management. The students were then able to put their Sniffy training into practice with the horses, working on co-operative care activities.

 Target training the horses is an integral part of cooperative care

Holly completed the week with a session on farm animal behaviour, where the students had a tour of our commercial pig farm and then spent time practicing different behavioural monitoring techniques – comparing differences in activity budgets using the different methods. It is really important for students to understand that the monitoring techniques we use can impact on the data gathered, and that this will be affected differently according to how active the animals we are observing are.

Undertaking behavioural observations at the pig unit

We absolutely love working with these students. Not only is everyone so passionate and interested in the tasks we are undertaking, but we get to learn so much from them as well – the US systems are quite different to UK systems and having a global view of animal behaviour and particularly animal welfare, is just as important to us as teaching staff as it is to the students undertaking the course.

We are also delighted to say, the students again had a fabulous time – we have included some quotes here:

“The staff and faculty at HAU made me feel right at home as a student- they were so welcoming and passionate about what they taught. For our specific animal behavior practicals, we got to interact with various species and understand how to assess animal welfare through behavior. I was so incredibly grateful to be a part of such an amazing program for those interested in the veterinary profession!” – Katie C

     “1. Studying behavior at HAU was such an amazing experience. 

2. The faculty was engaging with students, and their passion for teaching and animals was evident in every interaction. 
3. I learned a great deal in lectures and was grateful that we had the opportunity to demonstrate our learning through hands-on labs.” – Amelia B

" ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ has incredible animal facilities. The teaching staff and animal personnel were so encouraging, passionate, and knowledgeable. I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn all about their physiotherapy practices." – Allee F

"We had the opportunity to observe the behavior of a variety of companion animals at ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ. This was an incredible experience that allowed me to learn about behavioral studies and practice different sampling techniques, which I can apply to my career in the future. I am grateful to the staff and personnel for sharing their unique knowledge and experience with me over the course of our time at HAU." – Nicola W

We are open to hosting a suite of short courses related to any of the work we do – please get in touch if you would like to discuss your requirements with us!