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.