The afternoon session the first day started with Temple Grandin’s plenary talk. The title captures what Temple Grandin has really spent her entire career doing: Crossing the divide between academic research and practical application of ethology on farms. As always, her talk was an energizing tour-de-force full of practical advice. She started by underlining that people in The Field don’t know that applied ethology exists, and that to reach them you need to simplify, simplify, simplify (not because they are not intelligent but because there is very little time to convey whatever concept). As an example of how to be clear, simple and specific in formulating guidelines: don’t write “sufficient space”, write “enough for all pigs to lie down at the same time”. Equally worth sharing is her final reflections which paraphrased went something like “I’ve spent my entire life designing slaughter houses, now they’re busy developing artificial meat, in 20 years people may be thinking that my work was unethical”. (I hope many of us are making that kind of reflection at least occasionally, because it is an important one. It is also one I hope to be able to explore in a future, ISAE-related project).
In the afternoon parallel session period, I of course followed the laboratory animal science strand. It started in an unusually coherent way, with two talks reporting work on the same cohort of mice, by Aimée Marie Adcock And Emma Nip. Their work is based on housing female mice in trios in either standard or enriched cages
As the photos show, this study brings back the environmental enrichment methodology that is hardly seen in laboratory animal welfare studies today, the one where the animals are given a radically richer environment, rather than the minimal-improvement-within-what-is-still-standard. Another interesting approach in this study is that the animals were housed in trios of three different strains (DBA, C57Bl6, Ball/c), which since they are distinctly coloured means that individual animals can be followed on videos without the need for individual marking.
The two subsequent talks reported studies done in collaboration with other animal users. Sophie Brajon reported results from our work on perinatal mortality in laboratory mouse breeding, where we followed mice in two different breeding facilities. Brianna Gaskill’s work took up recommendations made a decade ago by Pascalle van Loo for reducing aggression in mice and applied them on mice in a toxicology study. Once this work which is still under analysis, both studies have potential to influence recommendations for housing and managing mice. This may also be true for the last study reported in this session, by Becca Franks on curiosity in zebrafish, because indeed the way this species is kept has very little to do with their natural behaviour.
Curiosity also drove me to take part in the final event of the day, a workshop on Animal Welfare Assessment Contest. I have seen this activity discussed in ISAE since more than a decade, but in all honesty, I never engaged with this North American concept of competing in how to evaluate animal welfare. It has always seemed rather alien to me: in Europe sports is the only activity we compete in at universities – outside the ongoing silent competition for the best marks of course. In a well organized session we got the taste of a real competition, got to try our hand at evaluating the welfare of working donkeys in two different contexts and watch the impressive performance of students with actual competition experience (Megan La Follette on the photo below).
Animalogues 