Animal Welfare and Behaviour Research is a key activity within the Faculty’s School of Clinical Veterinary Science. Research spans fundamental underpinning work to applied on-farm and clinical work allowing contributions to both the development of animal welfare science, and the improvement of animal welfare.
This includes animal cognition and animal emotion; physiological events surrounding nociception and stunning and slaughter.
This includes using welfare indicators (e.g. behaviour, neuroendocrinology, immunology, heath) and motivational priorities (e.g. consumer demand, self-selection of analgesics/anxiolytics) to evaluate welfare of farm, laboratory, zoo, companion and draught animals; using epidemiological techniques to identify welfare risk factors; studying pet-owner interactions and attitudes to animal use.
This includes development of welfare assessment methods for farms and animal rescue; development and implementation of farm assurance schemes with regard to welfare criteria, assessing and improving the welfare of draught equines in developing countries.
This includes biostatistical analyses of complex datasets; multi-level modelling; mathematical modelling of predictions from evolutionary theory, and decision-making processes.
Further details can be found on the Clinical Veterinary Science and University Research Centre for Behavioural Biology web pages.
