Over the past few years, we have seen the developments of an array of new and exciting methods, to more directly accessing animal experiences. There's an increasing interest in animal pain responses and welfare. And a greater appreciation of the need to improve our recognition of pain behaviors, if we're to be sure that we're providing adequate pain management. As well as an increasing interest in the role, that early development plays in how animals respond to pain and stress later in life. >> My name is Cathy Dwyer. I lead a team of behavior and welfare scientists at SRUC, just outside Edin. My main area I guess, is I'm interested in how mothers and offspring interact with each other, and how that helps the offspring develop. But also how that helps them in terms of their welfare. So we're interested in the welfare of the mother, but also the welfare of the offspring and how they develop. So up until a few years ago, we used to think that, I guess really once an animal was born, that was when it started to learn and develop. And that's when things happened to it that might affect it's welfare. But we now know a lot more about what happens in development. So really right from the point where the egg is released and becomes fertilized, but even really before then. So even before conception. Things that happened to the mother and very recently we know now also things that happened to the father before he mates with the mother, can have an impact on that developing embryo. So some of the ways that we look at that, is to manipulate the nutritional environment. So we might do that by using a process called embryo transfer, where we take an embryo from one mother and we put it into the uterus, to the womb of another mother, and we look at how those things that might've happened to that embryo in one mother. Very early on, so the sort of nutritional environment that that came from, and how that affects, how it develops, when that nutrition environment has changed, because they're now in a different mother. It may be a mother of a different breed of animals. And we can look at whether early life development is affected by the breed of the mother. Or we may look at things like different stressful events that we know happened in the lives of pregnant mothers. So we might look at how they're handled by humans, how they're housed. Whether they're housed in large groups or small groups. Whether there's competition for food. All sorts of things that might happen on a farm, to a farm animal, and what does that mean for the offspring? Some of the sort of indicators that we might look at will be behavior. But we'll also look at the placenta. So the placenta is the afterbirth, or the organ that the mother communicates with the fetus through, with her developing offspring through. So that regulates the amount of oxygen, the amount of nutrition and crucially, I guess some of the hormones that might reach the fetus. The stress hormones in the mother, how they might reach the fetus. And how they might affect the developing brain and organs and tissues of the fetus. So we know that one of the targets for early life development is the stress access. So the access that we're concerned about from an animal welfare point of view, is also affected by things that happen in the mother before birth. So we can see that, and these are permanent effects. So we can see that the things that happen to the mother, have a long lasting impact on how the offspring might cope with a stressful event. >> In addition to Kathy, work pioneered in Edinburgh by Professor Francoise Wemelsfelder, has looked at the reliability of human observations of behavioral expression in different species. And she's shown that using a trust your eyes approach for describing animal feelings, might be a lot more accurate than scientists once thought. Francoise has shown that there's good agreement amongst people, when they describe animal expressions. And there's also good correlations between their descriptions, and much more objective measures of welfare such as cortisol levels. >> 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. >> This has led to some truly innovative studies of animal facial expression, and the development of pain scoring systems called grimace scales. Based on the idea that animals will show characteristic changes in ear, nose, whisker and eye shape and movements, that can be related to different painful experiences. The next, really exciting challenge for scientists, is to develop robust and practical methods for assessing positive emotions, such as happiness. Something that is currently being looked at in New Zealand, by researchers looking at horses. Animal welfare is complex and challenging. And at times, it can actually be quite distressing. But it is without a doubt one of the most rewarding areas to work in. Being able to provide direct and indirect evidence of what is important for an animal. And how we can improve its life experience, is not just scientifically engaging, it is also something that most animal welfare scientists are extremely passionate about. And I really hope that this come across to you during the next few weeks of this course.
