June - the conference season is starting!
We are not even in July, but the conference season is already starting. Several events are taking place this week, including the ASAB (Association for the Study of Anima Behaviour) ethics workshop, IPVS (International Pig Veterinary Society) 2022 in Brazil, the ONE conference hosted by EFSA in Brussels and HealthyLivesotck meeting in Bologna.
ASAB Ethics workshop brought in-depth ethics discussion in animal behaviour and welfare research. There were discussions about improving ethics review mechanisms at the personal, institutional and regional level. At the individual level, as researchers, it is important to go back to the 3Rs principles and always truthfully report according to the ARRIVE guidelines. At the institutional level, sometimes it is not easy to keep the consistency between review committees and even more difficult for researchers without sound institutional resources to help with the review process. But ethics can go deeper than these external constructs. What is even more difficult are the fundamental issues that are surrounding animal studies, whether behaviour, welfare or biomedical. Most of the times there is no one right or wrong answers, but the more crucial thing is to think, be aware and talk transparently about possible ethical dilemmas. Students should also learn all about ethics issues at the beginning of their career, starting from every experimental conceptualisation and design. I recently co-authored a paper An international perspective on ethics approval in animal behaviour and welfare research (free 50 day access until 23 July 2022 at https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1fBB2cF2OkuqA), which in a way in itself a case study of the ambivalent of ethical choices in formulating this "study".
More information on ASAB Ethics workshop can be found here: https://asabvirtual2020.wixsite.com/ethics
Interestingly, ONE Conference and HealthyLivestock meeting touched on some similar issues in connecting animal welfare and animal health. In a sense, we are still trying to prove that improved animal welfare can indeed contribute to better animal resilience and therefore better health and less antimicrobial use. But sometimes the link is not easily established, especially when "better welfare" is itself a fluid term. It's quite surprising that in the ONE conference, many sessions focused on open science and establishing the credibility and public trust in science in general, especially under recent food safety related topics. We are living now in a knowledges-contesting world, where everyone seems to have a say about everything, but no one knows who really knows about anything. Citizens, consumers and food producers are all looking for information to help them make better decisions and it is not easy. The ONE concept is to connect all the dots together, e.g., human health with animal health with environmental health; animal welfare with human welfare with societal welfare; sustainability with welfare, health and society. We are all trying to look for win-win-win situations but sometimes I can't help feeling that once the issue becomes a giant, complex conglomerate, it is a behemoth that is increasingly difficult to tackle. I always prefer the approach to break things down, but which is the better way forward?
ONE conference https://www.one2022.eu/
HealthyLIvestock https://healthylivestock.net/
The only conference I did not get to join in the end was the IPVS pre-congress sessions where they talked about "Use of antimicrobials and resistance in pig" and "Pig production from an Agro-industry perspective", which are two topics that seem very interesting!
IPVS 2022 https://ipvs2022.com/en/congresso/full-programme