Putting animal welfare on the map

Massey University and Australian animal welfare experts gathered for their first meeting to talk through animal welfare issues, putting them on the world animal welfare stage, says Massey's Professor Kevin Stafford reports The Manawatu Standard. The meeting saw representatives from five research institutions come together to discuss how they could contribute to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), particularly in Oceania and the wider Asian region. Massey's Animal Welfare Science and Bioethics Centre was named as an OIE collaborating centre in 2007. The centre operates as a partnership between the New Zealand and Australian governments and the research institutions. And the history and future of animal welfare is encompassed in a new book co-written by two Massey University researchers involved in the centre. The book provides distinct New Zealand perspectives on the theory and practice of animal welfare science set in a global context. He said agricultural sciences and veterinary sciences had made major contributions to animal welfare before people even started thinking about it: "Through things like forage management, the storage of feeds for the months when they're in scarce supply, dealing with soil deficiencies and the animals ending up with deficiency diseases, as well as veterinary advances that have led to 61 vaccines that are used world-wide, they have all improved the health and wellbeing of animals."