Fundamental Science Underpinning Animal Welfare

Image credit: Mike Mendl

Accurate assessment of animal welfare together with a better understanding of how animals perceive, respond to and are affected by welfare challenges, are all essential to understand and mitigate the impact of housing and husbandry procedures on welfare.

Our research tackles these questions through studies of motivation, cognition and emotion, individual differences in how animals cope with challenge, and the links between behaviour, physiology, immunology and health. We also research and develop a range of novel markers of animal welfare. For example, we pioneered the cognitive bias approach to assessing animal emotion.