Program
Program
The program is still under development, but there will be plenary sessions, short oral and poster presentations on the sub-themes:
Welfare assessment and enhancement
Methods and techniques to assess and improve animal welfare in livestock, companion, captive and laboratory animals, including "on-farm assessment", epidemiological approaches and environmental enrichment.
Management of unwanted animals
The application of ethology to the management, control and humane killing of pest, feral and companion animals, and the humane killing of unwanted farm and laboratory animals. Topics may include managing reproductive behaviour; improving our understanding of animal movement; using behaviour to target particular species; using behaviour to exclude animals from specific areas; and assessment of methods of humane killing.
Animal emotion and cognition
Topics may include methods for studying emotion and cognition, such as the role of neuroscience; demonstration of cognitive abilities of species; positive emotions, such as pleasure, satiety and satisfaction; and enhancing our scientific understanding of emotional states in animals.
Animals in extensive and natural environments
Topics may include technologies for behavioural data logging/capture from animals; the role of ethology in the conservation of native species and harvesting/culling of wildlife; remote management and control of livestock; and the challenges of monitoring behaviour of animals in extensive areas (including aquatic environments).
Animal-human interactions
How animals and humans interact and the effect of these interactions on behaviour and welfare of companion, livestock, captive or laboratory species.
The Wood-Gush Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Lesley Rogers of the University of New England.
The theme for the social program will be "under tropical skies" with the emphasis being very much on outdoor venues and activities (so don't forget to pack your swimming togs!).
Wood-Gush Memorial Lecture
The Wood-Gush Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Prof Lesley Rogers and will be entitled "Brain and behavioural lateralization in perspective, including its relevance to animal welfare". Lesley Rogers is Emeritus Professor at the University of New England, Australia where she co-ordinates the Centre for Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour. She was Professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at the University of New England from 1993-2007. She has a Doctor of Philosophy and a Doctor of Science from the University of Sussex and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Her publications, numbering over 450, include 14 books and well over 200 scientific papers and book chapters, mainly in the field of brain and behaviour, with a focus on development and lateralization. Her discovery of lateralization in the chick brain was one of three initial findings that established the now rapidly growing field of brain lateralization in animals. She has received a number of awards for excellence in research, including a Special Investigator Award from the Australian Research Council, an Australian Centenary Medal, the Clarke Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales and election as a Corresponding Fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union.
Keynote Speakers
Associate Professor John Barnett
Principal Research Fellow in Animal Welfare, Faculty of Food and Land Resources, The University of Melbourne
Associate Professor John Barnett undertook his undergraduate training in England, completed a PhD at Monash University, Australia and subsequently held post-doctoral positions at Hull University in the UK and then at La Trobe University in Australia. He joined the Victorian Government's Department of Primary Industries (DPI) in Melbourne in the late 1970s and was there for 30 years. Earlier this year he resigned from DPI and currently works at the University of Melbourne's School of Agriculture and Food Systems in the Animal Welfare Science Centre; this is a joint centre of the Department of Primary Industries, the University of Melbourne and Monash University. This centre provides a focus for animal welfare research in Australia.
He has published 150 articles in journals and books and another 300 publications including addresses to conferences, reports and industry articles. He is a member of a number of advisory committees including a ministerial advisory committee on animal welfare and the World Society for the Protection of Animals' scientific advisory panel. He also manages the animal welfare programme for the Australian Poultry Cooperative Research Centre and chairs a Victorian government Animal Ethics Committee for wildlife and small institutes.
John has worked extensively on welfare issues associated with intensively farmed livestock, particularly housing systems for pigs and poultry, but also species-specific issues such as tail docking in dairy cows, beak trimming in laying hens, alternatives to surgical mulesing in sheep and the welfare of cloned dairy calves. He is currently involved in fundamental research on welfare methodology, utilising both pigs and poultry and for the last 8 years he has been working with industry, government and welfare groups to develop comprehensive welfare audits for the livestock industries.
Dr Dominique Blache
Senior Lecturer, School of Animal Biology
Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, The University of Western Australia
Dr Dominique Blache completed his PhD at INRA in France and the AFRC Neuroendocrine Laboratory at Babraham in the UK. He was then awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Western Australia. From 1993 to 2000, he worked on projects funded by ARC or NHMRC investigating the effect of nutrition on the reproductive capacity. This work has led to a large number of collaborations nationwide and worldwide with top laboratories working in reproduction and nutrition (UK, USA, NZ, Denmark, Turkey, France). In July 2000, he was appointed as a Lecturer in Animal Science and developed and coordinated the new unit "Animal Welfare and Ethics". He was promoted to Senior lecturer in 2005. He has supervised 17 PhD students and 27 undergraduate projects since 1993. The most recent PhDs have been orientated towards the study of the effect of selection for low and high emotional reactivity on reproductive capacity, energetic, behaviour and animal welfare of sheep. He has published more than 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters and 100 communications at scientific meetings. His work has been supported by the ARC, MLA, RIRDC and NHMRC.
Alain Boissy
Senior Researcher, Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA)
Alain Boissy is a senior researcher at the French Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) with more 20 years experience in applied animal welfare. He did his PhD in cattle biology on the effects of environmental and neuroendocrine factors on the emotional reactions of heifers (University of Paris, France). His research interests include social behaviour and emotional reactivity in cattle and small ruminants, taking into account the respective influences between social behaviour and emotional reactivity. He has also a special interest for the genetic background of stress and emotional reactivity. Since 2000, he has developed a novel approach for assessing emotions in animals from their cognitive abilities, using a framework originally developed in human cognitive psychology. He is the leader of the team entitled "Behavioural Adaptation and Animal Welfare" (6 researchers, 5 technicians and currently 4 post-docs and PhD) of the Herbivores Research Unit at INRA Research Centre of Theix (France). He is also the leader of a French collaborative project on "Emotions and Cognition" involving 6 French teams and belongs to the core group of the French network AgriBEA managing research on welfare in Farm Animals (170 members). He has produced more than 60 refereed papers and book chapters and about 80 oral communications presented at national and international conferences.
Ed Charmley
Officer-in-Charge, CSIRO Livestock Industries
With a background in ruminant nutrition Dr Charmley has worked with sheep, dairy and mostly beef cattle in three countries (UK, Canada, Australia). Research has focussed on the animal plant interface with particular interest in silage and pasture research. For the last 8 years he has also been involved with research management but continues to spend about 20% of time on research. Since moving to Australia in 2005, he has focussed his attention on the management of beef cattle in extensive rangeland systems, including remote monitoring using GPS. Publications include 60 peer reviewed papers, several book chapters and invited reviews, 70 conference proceedings and over 90 industry publications. He is currently officer in charge of the CSIRO Livestock Industries site in Rockhampton, Queensland.
Darryl Jones
Darryl Jones is an Associate Professor in the Griffith School of Environment, Griffith University. He holds a Master in Natural Resources from the University of New England (Armidale, NSW) in wildlife management and a PhD in behavioural ecology from Griffith University. These two strands of his academic training - the applied and the pure - continue to inform his research. While maintaining his life-long interest in mound-building birds, he now concentrates on urban ecology - especially the management and conservation of the wild animals that live with us in the suburban environment. In this context he has been researching a range of important wildlife-human interactions in an urban context, including attacks by magpies and other birds, and the global phenomenon of wildlife feeding, a remarkably little understood but profoundly important form of interaction between nature and urban humans. He is the author of six books including The Megapodes (1995, Oxford), Magpie Alert: Learning to Live with a Wild Neighbour (2002 UNSW Press) and Mound-builders (2008 CSIRO) and over 100 scientific papers. As well as formal science publishing, he is deeply committed to communicating to the public and writes many popular articles as well as a column on urban wildlife in the magazine Wildlife Australia.
Dr Bidda Jones
Bidda Jones is the Chief Scientist with RSPCA Australia based in Canberra. She graduated with honours in zoology from the University of Sheffield and completed her PhD on the behaviour of common marmosets at the University of London. She began working to improve the welfare of laboratory primates during her PhD and then as Scientific Officer for the Research Animals Department of the UK RSPCA. Since 1996 she has worked for RSPCA Australia, providing science-based advice and information on a wide range of animal welfare policy issues to government, industry and the public.
Dr Clare Veltman
Scientist, Department of Conservation, New Zealand
Clare researched cooperative behaviour of magpies for her PhD from Massey University in 1984, and went on to lecture there in animal behaviour and behavioural ecology until 1997 when she joined the Department of Conservation. In collaboration with students and during fellowships at Cambridge University and Imperial College at Silwood Park, Clare studied behaviour of ladybird beetles, fruitflies, blue ducks, sambar deer, feral horses, kagu and weka, and correlates of invasion success of exotic birds. At the Department of Conservation, Clare's research is focused on ecology and control of invasive mammals. She has investigated lures for feral goats, mortality of brushtail possums during 1080 operations, and collaborated to model interactions between pest populations to investigate food web effects of pest control. She is now investigating adaptive management for the restoration of forests affected by deer, which involves measuring how plants respond to deer control at four sites and coordinating the team of scientists, managers and stakeholders who developed the conceptual and mathematical models that underpin the work.