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Four members of the Animal Behaviour and Welfare Research Group (Dr Holly Vickery, Dr Ellen Williams, Jen Sadler and Alice King) had an exciting outing to Halesowen College to discuss their research on the welfare of animals in educational settings.  

Left to right: Joe Cooke (Halesowen College), Jen Sadler, Holly Vickery, Ellen Williams, Alice King

This research started in 2022, with a conversation at our ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ Companion Animal House about how we use our animals. Within the education sector we are striving to increase the numbers of students who access our courses, and in order to teach critical skills across a wide range of courses in both Further and Higher Education we must create opportunities for hands-on animal experiences. However, this does not come without a risk to animals, and there is a need to generate data regarding animal welfare in these situations. 

Animals are used for a range of things within educational facilities, including behavioural observations, animal handling for students to learn skills in animal restraint or undertaking health checks, and general husbandry routines, including enclosure cleaning or provision of enrichment. And we know that humans - including both their presence and their actions - can have a range of impacts on animals and that this is in turn affected by several different factors including the previous experiences of animals and their individual personalities. 

As there are large numbers of animals regularly used in educational facilities, we wanted to undertake research to understand the types of activities animals are used for, which animals are used, and what procedures in place to manage and monitor these activities. We also wanted to determine stakeholder perceptions in regards potential welfare implications for animals in education and identify research priorities in this area. 

We have been developing this research in collaboration with and . UKACT is a professional membership association for those working in education facilities running animal care related courses and Landex supports land-based colleges and universities in the UK. We’re incredibly excited to be really getting this research off the ground and hope you will watch this space for outputs coming soon! 

The purpose of our visit to Halesowen was twofold: 

• To see the animal unit and understand more about the way in which animals are used to deliver the curriculum at Halesowen college 

• To discuss more about how we can work with Halesowen College to continue to deliver a suite of impactful work in relation to animals being used in education 

We had a great day out and the unit has a really interesting set up which enables students to learn lots of different skills in relation to animal management. We came back with lots of inspiration for our Companion Animal House and hope our technical staff are able to make a visit to Halesowen soon!  

Most importantly, though, we also had some exciting conversations around how we can work together to grow this research. Alice King is doing her PhD on how guinea pig personality plays into their welfare in animal practicals and Jen Sadler is looking at developing welfare friendly guidelines for animals used in education. Both Alice and Jen are going to be using Halesowen as a study site which is super important to enable us to capture site-specific variation in both animals, and the types of practicals, that are routinely being undertaken. Having these kinds of opportunities for collaboration, especially with organisations such as UKACT and Landex is so important in undertaking impactful research as it gives a real opportunity to shape future, welfare-friendly guidelines for animals used in education.  

The animals in education team are going to be running workshops at the UKACT Annual Conference and the Landex Conference (both at Askham Bryan this year) to undertake stakeholder consultations on this topic and we are hoping to be able to share the outputs of those later on this year.  

We would still love to hear from you if you work with an educational facility that uses animals within teaching. We have two questionnaires which are currently live. If you or a friend or colleague use animals within teaching then we would be very grateful if you could complete the appropriate questionnaire, available at the following links: 

If you have an animal collection and would like to get involved with data collection we’d also love to hear from you, just drop us an email and we can send you further details about this suite of work.