ISAE post-conference recap
This year's ISAE conference was held in Ohrid, North Macedonia during 4-9 Sep, 2022. It is the first ever ISAE conference taking place in the Balkans, which signifies the regional development of applied ethology in this area. Everyone is looking forward to this conference since we have not had an in-person international conference for the ISAE community for 3 years. As the Assistant Development Officer for ISAE, I am also especially excited for this year's conference as we also finally held our first in-person Developing Countries Conference Attendance Fellowship since the pandemic. Our last physical presence was in 2019 in Bergen, where I was also part of the great fellowship programme, and the experience also prompted me to contribute more to ISAE's causes and the further promotion of applied ethology and farm animal welfare in general.
The main theme of this year's conference is "Animal Behaviour and Beyond," which further divides into seven sub-themes related to applied animal behaviour and welfare ranging from indigenous breeds in extensive systems, damaging behaviour, human-animal interactions, genetics and breeding, Precision Livestock Farming, on-/off-farm management and positive welfare.
The conference kicked off with the Wood-Gush Memorial lecture, with a special remembrance talk by Alistair Lawrence on the life of David Wood-Gush in the 100th year since his birth in 1922. He is the founder of the prestigious MSc course Applied Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare at the University of Edinburgh, and also the first ever non-veterinarian member for the Society for Veterinary Ethology (SVE), the predecessor of today's ISAE founded in 1966. David has enormous influence to the discipline of applied ethology through his own work, the work of his numerous students, colleagues and the students and colleagues after them that has since formed a web of knowledge and established the foundation of our research. It is wonderful to celebrate his 100th birthday with Friederike Range's (Wolf Science Center, Vetmeduni Vienna, Austria) talk on the difference between wolves and dogs in terms of aggression and the level of cooperation with humans. Their differences are not so straightforward, and many depend on which wolf/dog, which human, which context the animals were tested in and what types of cooperation are expected. The pet breed dogs, the free-roaming dogs, the present wild wolves and hand-raised wolves under a research environment may all react differently when interacting with humans.
In the on-farm management session, a lot has been discussed on various pain-alleviating methods related to different painful husbandry practices, such as male piglet castration, dairy calf disbudding, male beef calf castration and male reindeer castration under extensive conditions. Most talks concluded that the current available pain-relieving methods do not have a satisfactory effect to substantially alleviate animals' pain and subsequent behavioural or other consequences. It is worth rethinking why these practices are necessary and if there are other alternatives to either completely avoid them or other longer-term pain management practices are needed.
In the afternoon session on the first day, I was also happy to talk about my own research which I conducted when I was working with Prof Thomas Parsons at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. In response to Prop 12 in California which states that all breeding sows should have a space allowance of 2.23 sq. m. (including post-weaned sows but excluding farrowing sows). This will hopefully improve the housing conditions for numerous pregnant sows currently still confined in stalls in the US as the new Californian law also applies to sows from which the pork sold in CA derived. Our project, on the other hand, focused on the period immediately post-weaning, as our systematic literature review suggested that we still know very little of what is the optimal housing for sows during this time. We compared conventional gestation stall, individual pen (3.84 sq. m.) and small group housing of 6-7 sows during 8 days immediately post-weaning (after which they were regrouped into a large dynamic ESF pen), and we evaluate how different housing impact their posture such as sitting, standing, lying ventrally and lying laterally. We found that their hormonal cycle had a greater effect on how they performed different postures. Sows housed in conventional stalls spent slightly longer time sitting, whereas sows in individual pens stand longer. We do not yet know whether standing for longer is a sign of poor welfare, but this difference suggests the importance of proper social contact is another neglected element that should be further investigated besides space restriction. We will soon have more results from different measures to inform more.
On the second day, one of the main themes was PLF and behaviour/welfare research. Janice's talk first gave us some caution but also potential promises in taking advantage of automated behaviour monitoring technologies/concepts to advance behaviour research. It really requires multidisciplinary collaborations, more transparency about data sharing and how a technique is developed, and reaching a consensus on best practices. We should keep in mind that all techniques are developed under specific contexts and it may affect how/if it can be successfully applied in other contexts. There are also undeniably resource/funding competition in the future development of behaviour research agendas. Some of the highlights from the PLF sessions include Juliette Schillings' very intriguing talk on how PLF technology may act as a boundary object to change the farmer's perception of animal welfare, as they become the end-users, Megan Woodrum Setser talked about using the already-existing on-farm technologies such as automatic milk and grain feeders to understand the animals' activity patterns and also the very important topic of long distance transport of pigs by deck-high video recording done by Cecilie Kobek-Kjeldager as a poster presentation.
Another highlight for me is the pig olfaction talk by Sarah-Lina Aagaard Schild. We all know olfaction is a very important sensory module for pigs but actually there are very few research focus. Sarah gave a very comprehensive overview of what we know so far (not much really!) about pig olfaction and the future potential in improving pig welfare through providing a pleasant olfactory environment for them. There is also a potential for non-invasive feral pig control. Maria Vilain Rørvang followed up with their current project on how olfactory agents may improve the effectiveness of environmental enrichment, but it is the most difficult to first figure out which odours are distinguishable and preferable by pigs. My current project PIGSMELL is also exploring indirectly the role of olfaction plays in their social communication, so I am very much looking forward in knowing how pigs smell and contributing to that knowledge.
Interestingly, in one afternoon we had on the one hand positive animal welfare talks in one room and abnormal and damaging behaviour in the other. It symbolises that, while we are trying to see, understand and promote animal welfare from a different perspective, not just eliminating the negative but also promoting the positive, we are still faced with the problems of the negative side that need to be tackled.
