I'm Alistair Lawrence. I have been working in this area for a considerable period of time. I'm a Scot, born and bred in a farm in Perthshire, which is about 50 miles short of where we're standing here. And I went to St. Andrews and studied zoology, and from there I came to Edinburgh and I was introduced to a man called David Rudgosh, who was really the father of what we think of as the animal welfare science. And he introduced me to the study of animal behavior as a way of understanding animals' lives to understand animals' perspectives and to try and put that into the context of, for example, animal farming. Well in some senses we've made almost unimaginable progress. One of the subjects I studied first was the close confinement of sows which are pregnant, and that system is now phased out int the UK and in the EU and is under question in many other parts of the world as a result not entirely, but largely as the result of science. And the way that science explored the issues of what it meant to a sow to be kept in those sort of conditions. Another very early piece of work for me was a rather similar question on sows which are giving birth, referred to as farrowing sows. And they're also kept in close confinement. And whilst that system remains legal in the EU, research which we've done over quite a long period of time, I have to say, is now progressively moving us towards a position where I think that system will no longer be legal in a relatively short period of time. The knowledge which we piece together, and it literally is piece by piece, no single piece of research is the answer, has just progressively lead firstly public opinion, to realize that farm animals are no different, really, to the pets that they care for. Secondly, to the policymakers to understand the public are very concerned about this. And lastly, and probably most importantly, to get farmers and retailers and those people who organize and control the supply chain of food to buy into this idea that animal welfare is something that should be the cornerstone of what we call livestock farming. >> [NOISE] >> Well, next is interesting, because I just said I thought, and I do think, that we have made this fantastic progress, and I should just say that that's not just in terms of these phasing out of systems, but in all sorts of ways, including global representation of the issues. It's just over ten years, really, that that became, it was started by different organizations beginning to take a global view, and now animal welfare is really big worldwide. But whilst we've made these very significant pieces of progress, at the same time, all sorts of other things are beginning to impinge upon the production of food, in particular, which may cause further issues to arise. And I'm thinking in particular of food shortage and the need for livestock production to become ever more efficient in order to supply this growing human population. The fact that in doing that we also have to cater for energy shortage, water shortage, and fertilizer shortage, and we've got to do that all within the umbrella of climate change. All dictates that livestock production in the future is going to be quite pressurized. And the past tells us that when we pressurize and intensify agriculture in that way, that animals can be the losers if we're not careful. So there's a very important point coming up where we need to continue to emphasize the case for animals in this new global food security argument.
