Humans are key to
improving animal welfare
SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College) and JMICAWE were delighted
and honoured to host a visit by Professor Temple Grandin of Colorado State University to Edinburgh in February.
Professor Grandin is a renowned writer on animal welfare, stockmanship and
livestock handling, as well as on her experiences of living with autism, and
has been a major contributor to improving animal welfare, especially in the
USA, for 40 years. She has recently been inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame
in USA.
During her visit Temple gave a riveting lecture to a packed auditorium
of staff and students from SRUC and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies
in the Roslin Institute. She shared her unique insights into how animals
perceive the world, and how this knowledge can be used to improve ease of
handling and livestock welfare. She reiterated her views, based on her long
experiences in the field, that ‘things’ (handling systems, engineering
products, genetics) would not improve animal welfare without improving
stockmanship and how people respond to the animals in their care.
Temple has
also been very involved in the improvements in animal welfare assessment in the
USA, and was clear that these systems worked when the measures were simple,
clearly related to the most important animal welfare issues (her ‘critical
control points’), and easy to apply in practice.
The feedback on her talk has
been extremely positive and students were inspired by her passion and
dedication to animal welfare. They were also delighted to be able to interact
with her on visits to the vet school and in discussing and presenting their own
research. Temple was extremely generous with her time, signing books and posing
for photos, and engaging with the research of our PhD students and early career
researchers. At the end of her visit we were all left in awe of this great
woman, but also inspired and energised to continue to work for improving animal
welfare.
A copy of Temple’s seminar will be available soon if you follow this link https://www.sruc.ac.uk/news/article/1802/world_leading_animal_welfare_expert_temple_grandin_speaks_at_sruc_seminar
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