>> I am Francoise Wemelsfelder.
And I'm an animal behavior and welfare scientist, at Scotland's Rural College.
My main interest in my research has been a methodology called
qualitative behavior assessment, that I've developed 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 its environment.
And the idea is that at this level of 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,
it's 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.
And so, these are qualitative descriptors that,
as you can see tell us a lot about how the animals feel.
My main interest has been to develop and
scientifically validate this approach.
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 animal's 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.
You can, 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, so it's important to have the scientists on board, and
to not have scientists say, oh, this is just not scientific, it is.
I am 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 everyday, and they know their animals.