Using Animal Body Language as a Measure of Subjective Experience: Interview with Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder

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Из курса от партнера The University of Edinburgh

Animal Behaviour and Welfare

1217 оценки

The University of Edinburgh

Animal Behaviour and Welfare

1217 оценки

Animal welfare has been described as a complex, multi-faceted public policy issue which includes important scientific, ethical, and other dimensions. Improving our understanding of animal welfare, involves the fascinating study of animal behavior as well as the challenge of accessing the emotions of animals. This is the On-Demand version of this course, which means you can start the course at any time and work through the course materials at your own pace. The materials and quizzes will always be available to you. You can come and talk about the course on Twitter using the hashtag #EdAniWelf

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What We Can Measure We Can Manage

Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Assessment

The Impact of Early Life Events on Stress Responsiveness in Animals: Interview with Professor Cathy Dwyer6:29

Using Animal Body Language as a Measure of Subjective Experience: Interview with Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder8:01

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Professor Nat Waran
Professor of One Welfare
Eastern Institute of Technology, Napier, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.
Dr Fritha Langford

Scotland's Rural College (SRUC)
Dr Heather Bacon
Veterinary welfare edcuation and outreach
Jeanne Marchig International Centre of Animal Welfare Education
Miss Hayley Walters, RVN

Welfare and Anaesthesia
Dr Jill MacKay
Animal Behaviour and Welfare Researcher
Animal Behaviour and Welfare Team, SRUC

Hi, I am Francoise Wemelsfelder, and I'm an Animal Behavior and

Welfare Scientist at Scotland's Rural College.

I'm a biologist by training, and

I'm originally from Holland as you can probably hear from my accent.

But I've been SRUC for 20 years.

My main interest in my research has been a methodology

called Qualitative Behavior Assessment.

That I'd developed it also with the help of

many colleagues in our team and across the world.

And the essence of this method is that it looks at the whole animal and

how the whole animal dynamically moves around it's environment.

And the idea is at this level the whole animal how it moves,

there are expressive qualities or in other words a body

language you could say that the animal has that we can directly see.

And it gives us a lot of information about the animal's perception of its world,

its effective state and also about his welfare.

So, for example,

sometimes animals can move in a way that's relaxed or they can be tense.

They can be curious and friendly.

Or they can be hesitant and anxious or

they can be lethargic and sluggish or they can be really lively.

Also these are qualitative

descriptors that as you can see tell us a lot about how the animals feel.

So what we've, I've been interested, my main interest has been to develop and

scientifically validate this approach.

So an important feature of qualitative behavior assessment is,

that it basically says that yes,

we can actually see how animals are experiencing their environment.

We can see how they feel, their expressing it through their whole demeanor.

And this is sometimes what scientists have problems with that, because in

conventional science feelings are defined as internal, invisible mental states.

That's how all students are educated.

And that can be important too.

For example related brain states.

But I really think it's important to go beyond that.

And increasingly there are models in philosophy, and models of what

consciousness is, what emotion is, that are supporting a more holistic view.

That says, yes, it's not just hidden,

a perception hidden inside our brain, feelings are connected to our demeanor,

to everything we do, and the same is true for animals.

And when you live with an animal,

you establish a rapport on this expressive interaction, don't you?

So, I think it is important to, again, recognize the integration of

new developments in philosophy and philosophy of mind and consciousness and

to integrate them with our science to support that we can see much more of what

animals feel and has been recognized, and to integrate this into our future work.

Well, it's really useful, because at the whole animal level it gives you

direct information about the animal's state that you can't really get

from more detailed physical measures.

Of course scientists always, that's what they focus on.

They want to zoom in and look at details, and then carefully quantify those details.

And that's very powerful and very important.

But they're missing out on a level of information that's there for

your own eyes to see.

It's common sense in a way that we can see

how the animals are experiencing their environment, right then and there.

And we get information that's more detailed, and

more subtle than you can get by first measuring, say, stress hormones.

So I think as a holistic qualitative method,

it really adds an important layer of interpretation and

holistic assessment that we get in our relationship with animals.

That's where we get this knowledge and I like to say that it's really important

to really know the animal well and to be well trained in how to do

this because yes we can trust our eyes but we can also make mistakes.

It's not just anything gross, because as well know,

it's very easy to look at animals as if they're little humans, and

we would project our own feelings or actions on the animal.

And animals have their own nature,

so we need to learn about a specific body language of different species.

But if we have that background knowledge and we know how to look at the whole

animal properly then there are things we can say that have great value for

understanding and assessing the welfare of the animals.

It is in common sense, and it'll be familiar to, this approach will be

familiar to anybody who has animals and who lives with them, but for science

of course, science has been traditionally quite critical of an approach like this.

They think it's subjective or anthropomorphic or

it's not scientific enough.

So it's been a really important goal of my work for

the past 20 years to validate this approach through research.

And so I've developed a methodology that allows us to instruct people properly and

to then teach them how to quantify the animals in qualitative expressions.

And through this research, which I'd like to stress has been done

in collaboration with a lot of other people and

groups across the world, we've shown that it is scientifically robust.

People can agree on what they see.

They can repeat it.

And most importantly it correlates well to other scientific measures,

like measures of stress hormones or physical behavior.

And so now gradually I think scientists are coming over.

They are starting to accept that yes, this can be a useful part of science and,

it's also I think, it's important to have the scientists on board and

to not have scientists say, oh, this is just not scientific, it is.

But I'm really pleased that this is happening because I think it's

important to honor the knowledge of the people who work with animals every day.

The farmers, the caretakers, the zoo caretakers,

the people who work with the animals every day.

And they know their animals.

Over the past 20, 30 years since animal welfare scientists started,

we've had to focused on developing a lot of different indicators.

And I think for the future it's important

to now start across disciplines to start to integrate different approaches.

Very strict scientific physical measures are important but also there's

much growing interest in social science, in animal welfare, in philosophy.

And I think this qualitative methodology that I've developed for

honoring people's relationship with animals, and

people seeing directly how animals feel, the qualitativesness of that,

is by tradition more accepted in the social sciences.

But I think my work has shown that we can integrate with biological science, and

I think in the future it's important to have to bring these things together for

the benefit of the animals obviously.

And a very important feature of QBA is that it's so quick to do.

It's for practical, on farm, practical in lap years or

in the wild even, it is something if people are well trained that you can use

to have a quick surveys of welfare to spot problems quickly.

It's like a shepard who knows that his sheep,

can see from a mile that his sheep that something's not right with it.

So I think QBA in the future if we go on developing this in a scientific way that's

scientifically supported then, it has great potential for being a handy,

practical tool that can be used on the ground, supported by other measures.

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