Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you and also for accommodating my management failings and allowing me to speak a little bit earlier. So what I'm going to give you today is really quite a short overview of how we set about determining the welfare issues and some of the sort of overarching concepts that came out of that. Before I start, I wanted to point out that this, a lot of this work was done by our very dear friend and colleague, Fiona Lang, who was a postdoc on this project and very tragically lost her life a couple of months ago.

So this project is really a sort of legacy or the talk is really her work predominantly in the group. So we know that and we've heard a lot about it today, that there's a lot of concern for the welfare of all animals that have some interaction with humans, and that probably extends beyond animals in captivity, but all animals are affected by us to some degree. Really coming from a concern for farm animals and now really a much broader area of concern.

But there are many, many issues, and we've heard lots of that today already, and sometimes these issues are prioritised for various reasons, so they may be determined by the interests of particular lobby groups. It may be public pressure, things that that the consumer or the citizen is worried about by legislative changes, maybe by international trade can prioritise which issues rise to the fore and get attention. But we can also prioritise by asking what are the most important issues in terms of animal suffering.

So what does it mean to the animal rather than perhaps what it means to a consumer or the perception of other groups? And suffering, and we've heard this already today, is often considered to be related to the severity of any welfare compromise. The duration of time for which that animal experiences that and how important or how prevalent that issue is in terms, and that could be considered in two ways.

One, I suppose, is the number of animals in total, so whether that's tens of thousands or millions of animals that are affected, or the percentage of animals that are affected within a particular species. So it is quite a complex issue for us to think about how do we prioritise these things. And so one of the questions that you can raise is, can this be done empirically?

Do we have evidence that allows us to weigh these different issues? And we know that there are limited objective welfare assessment tools available. We've heard a little bit about that today as well, some of the different ways that we can both conceptualise animal welfare and also objectively assess it.

But there are also more sort of philosophical underlying difficulties and how do we compare things like severe acute suffering with a prolonged chronic condition. So there may be greater severity on the one hand, but longer duration in the other. And how do we weigh these different things up?

And again, we lack empirical evidence to allow us to do this. Again, we've already talked a little bit about how we can think about prevalence. Is this all the animals?

And if we think about that often something like fish or broiler chickens will always rise to the top because these are the most numerically in terms of our management, these are the most numerically important. All right, is it the proportion of the population, if 100% of a particular population suffer, is that more important than 10%, but of an enormous number of animals? And do we have good evidence of prevalence, and we heard something about that in the last debate as well.

And again, do we have good evidence to allow us to really make these sorts of judgments. So really in the absence of all this empirical evidence, one of the ways that we've tackled this is to use expert consensus, and we heard very nicely from Roman Pizzi earlier about some of the pitfalls of using expert consensus. And if we agree, it doesn't necessarily mean that that's right.

But it is one recognised way of addressing these particular issues. So that is the approach that we took, and this will be affected by who the experts are. We've already heard something about different definitions or different characterizations of animal welfare, and different experts may wait the biological functioning part of welfare versus natural living or the freedom to do particular behaviours versus what the animal might be experiencing or its feelings.

Agreement doesn't necessarily mean the experts are right, it just means we all agree. And there can be the way that we've approached this is to try to limit the influence of a very dominant or a very charismatic individual who might drag a particular viewpoint to one side and also the bandwagon effects as human beings we're very often we like to achieve a consensus by agreeing with the dominant position. So one of the ways of trying to limit this is to use a Delphi approach, which is largely anonymous, which means that people make decisions on their own without having access to the other information, who the other people are, and also what decisions they have made.

But this does lead to less discussion of the underlying issues and can be extremely time consuming. And so Fiona spent vast amounts of the time she spent on this project, actually in conversation with individual experts, cheering people up, getting answering their queries and so on. So it's an enormously time consuming process.

So what we did in this study is we identified 10 species groups that we were going to focus on from the outset. Those were companion animal groups, so we looked at dogs, cats, rabbits, horses. We also attempted to look at exotics, I put some caveats around that.

I think when we said we would do that, it was very ambitious and we weren't really aware of the the scale and we just had a big debate about that, the scale of what we were really going to attempt to do. For farm animals, we looked at cattle, pigs, poultry, and small ruminants, and we also looked at managed wildlife. And again, that was probably one of our more ambitious projects.

These multi-species groups were really very challenging for our experts, and if any of your experts are in the room, I really appreciate your time and energy spent on trying to tackle this really difficult problem. So we also focused on animals, this is based on what was happening in the UK, so we weren't interested, we weren't focusing on animals in in other countries. Our aim was to recruit between 12 and 20 experts per group, so most studies suggest that you have better reliability with around that number of people, but it doesn't become too unwieldy and too time consuming.

In actuality, we recruited between 11, which was our rabbit group, and 19, which was our horse group, so we're pretty close to where we were aiming for. We defined our experts quite broadly. So we included practising vets, animal welfare scientists, what we loosely called industry representatives.

So obviously in some species, there was more obvious industry representation than others. And we included people working for NGOs or charities as well. So what we were aiming for were both the academic and the specialist understanding of particular things, but also the practical knowledge and experience that people may have from working in a particular industry.

They had to be based in the UK because we were interested in the welfare of animals in the UK and we rather arbitrarily decided they should have been to they were as an expert, they should have been working in their field for at least 3 years as some sort of quality definition of their expertise. So this was the design of our study. We recruited experts into each of these 10 species groups.

The groups are divided into two, those in blue, dogs, cattle, small ruminants, pigs, and poultry. We consider that there was quite a lot of information in the literature already. They've been quite reasonably well studied.

And that we could use literature review to derive an initial list of welfare issues that we thought would be broad and cover most of the issues that would be affecting these species. For cats, rabbits, horses, exotics and wildlife, there was less information in the literature. And so our poor experts in these groups had to do an additional layer of work for us.

We set up an online anonymous discussion board where the experts for each of those species groups and our experts could post what they thought were important welfare issues. Or welfare issues in general. They could then add to those, comment on those, so they could use it as a discussion, but it was all anonymous.

And then we use thematic analysis to draw out the different welfare issues. So in the initial phase, we separated these groups. Once we had our list of welfare issues, then the same process was applied to each of those 10 groups.

So in round one, again this is anonymous, they were asked to rate the severity, the duration and the prevalence in their opinion, of each of the welfare issues that they were given on a 6 point liquor scale. We then took that information and we we looked at the individual rankings, we looked at the median overall rankings, and we produced a list of everything that scored at least was somewhat important to on average to the expert group. And in the second round, that shorter list went back to our experts, and they reviewed that list again and looked at how successful that had been, whether they agreed or disagreed, whether they thought those issues should go up or down the list.

And in the final round, we didn't have anonymity anymore. We had a workshop in Edinburgh where we brought a smaller number of experts together, and their aim was to take that shorter list and bring it down to approximately 10 issues per species for their particular species group, and there there was more debate and discussion around each of the issues. So in total we recruited 144 experts to our panels, and they were roughly equal numbers of vets, so we had 29% were practising as veterinarians, 26% were animal welfare scientists, 21% worked for the charity sector, and we had 24 others that in some way or other worked for the particular industry or the particular area of those species.

We were about 2/3 female, which probably reflects the the demographic of the people that we were reaching out to, and 7 out of 10 of our species groups were female biassed, but the exotics group, the wildlife group, and small ruminants had more men than women in comparison to the other groups. Our response rate was 79% in the first round and 77% in the second round, which is quite high for this sort of work. In fact, it's very high compared to lots of other studies, and most studies agree that if you have 70% or above, then that Delphi is quite robust.

I think a lot of our, our, our people were very invested in, in what they'd done and particularly those who'd been involved in the discussion boards were extremely invested and therefore they carried on through the process. In the final iteration we had 2 days in Edinburgh with 21 of our experts and we included at least 2 per species groups, but we did select people who had a broader range of knowledge and again we tried to have the balance between our 4 different categories of experts at our workshops. So for each of the species groups, the first column here, the welfare issues is how many welfare issues those those species groups dealt with to begin with.

So each of those with an asterisk connects to them are those that have been derived from the discussion boards, and you can see that our cat group were particularly active and came up with 118 welfare issues for us to think about. I should say that for both the exotics and the wildlife group had slightly lower numbers, and that did not reflect the quality of the experts or their efforts, the more the difficulty of the task that we had set them. For the second round for round one, we reduced numbers by about 5 to 3, so these were the animal, the issues that were identified as being at least somewhat important.

And again, you'll notice that the exotics group is relatively low, but this was a really difficult challenge for them. So a lot of the feedback we were getting. They didn't have sufficient information that the area was so variable.

There were so many different species that it was difficult to do the task, and I think on reflection, if we had thought about it, we may not have tackled it in the same way for the exotics because I think this was not a method that was really suited to that to the difficulties inherent in that particular group. That's probably also true to a certain extent to the wildlife group. So finally we came to sunny Edinburgh and the sun did shine, which is not always the case, and we had a series of small group exercises, so where we looked at each of the different welfare issues that had reached had been prioritised, looked at the rankings, and worked through where they would be for each of the different species groups.

We then had more group discussion where there was debate and justification to other experts about where the rankings had gone and. Which also helped sort of crystallise some of the issues, . This is some of the sort of output that we had, so some people were better at art, I suppose, than others, but we've also looked at moving some of those post-its up and down a little bit for some of our different groups.

Part of the work in the workshop was . Divided the issues into those that affected the population, so prevalence, and considered severity and duration together as those welfare issues that affect the individual. So we didn't end up with 3 more sets of lists, but only 2 lists.

And then we had the final sort of cross cutting part of this where we had people worked within their own species groups and then we had a group discussion about what were the issues that were coming out and you can see the sort of outcomes of some of the discussion and the evidence that we collected there. So I'm not going to go through all the welfare issues that we prioritised because there's large numbers of them, so I thought I would just show you the cross cutting issues. So those issues that each of the species groups thought were important and prioritised, and these aren't in a ranking order.

Except that the lack of knowledge of the welfare needs of the species was prioritised by every species group as the most important thing that was affecting animal welfare. So we've already debated quite a lot how that affects the welfare of exotic species, but this was something that came up in every single group. And in some cases, this was, as with the exotics, that a lot of that information is probably not known.

There's no research, they haven't gathered that evidence, so the evidence is not available to anybody, to owners or to to veterinarians. Some of the lack of knowledge was that the knowledge was known. It was known to science, it was known to vets, but it wasn't known by the owners, so that information had not been transferred effectively to owners either before purchase or while they were looking after the animal.

And some of that lack of knowledge maybe is known. It's known by everybody. It's known by the animal keepers, but it's not implemented.

And that can be for structural reasons, access reasons for farm animals, and a whole host of other reasons which may stop someone carrying out what they may know to be best practise, and I think there's a whole area of human behaviour change out there to understand why those things may not happen. The poor recognition and treatment of pain was something that came up very frequently, and again this is something that was considered an issue across all species. So often it was the owners did not have sufficient knowledge or sufficient understanding or they classified pain as something else.

So in horses it may be seen as naughtiness, shyness, bolshiness, or whatever. In other animals it may be seen as problem behaviours rather than because it's resulting from pain. There was concern that animals are not receiving healthcare when they need it, and this may vary from animals like rabbits that aren't vaccinated, rarely go to the vets, and not seen by vets, and therefore not receiving routine health care through to farmers making decisions where vets rarely come to the farm and therefore the animals are not receiving veterinary treatment.

They may be receiving healthcare from the farmer. There was concern about particular health issues, and those differed for different species, but in general it was the chronic or the endemic health issues that were being prioritised, things that were seen as a problem in many animals and will continue to be a problem. Consequences of breeding decisions, of course, both in dogs and cats and rabbits bred for flat phases, but also in poultry and in pigs, lack an appropriate environment, and the consequences of that can be things like social behaviour, problem behaviours.

The inability to feed animals, and this seems like we're just rediscovering the five freedoms, but we are not feeding animals in any of these groups appropriately either by their diet or by the feeding mechanism. And as we've heard already this morning, delayed euthanasia is also an issue. And finally, neonatal mortality and morbidity was prioritised by all the farm animal groups, not so much by the companion animal, but there was discussion around how actually some of this is an issue for exotics and potentially also for things like animals coming from puppy farms where we maybe do not know the numbers of neonatal mortalities.

So just to conclude, we did reach a consensus on the most important issues. Now that might sound trivial, but actually there was long periods in this project and during the workshop when I didn't think that was going to happen. So the fact that we did reach a consensus, I think is important.

But there were lots of difficulties. There's limited information, especially on the prevalence of many of the issues. Ranking was really challenging in many cases.

Consensus did improve when we had the discussion and the debate element, so although we had to lose some of the benefits and anonymity we gained by having that discussion. We weren't able to do ranking across species. Now it was something we sort of set out thinking that we might be able to achieve, but we had a bit of a revolt and our experts, I think, who just refused to do it.

So we didn't even attempt it at that point. I just remembered why I much prefer working with with animals. .

You were lovely, all of you and I think the other, but more seriously, I think one of the other points is that the methodology does focus on negative issues and not positive welfare. And I think we've heard something about that today as well. And I think that's a really important issue that it focused on problems because that was how the question was framed, and that's what we got an answer to.

We didn't look at the positive aspects of welfare, but it does provide a framework to prioritise our activities in the future. Thank you. Thank you, Cathy.

We've just time maybe just for a couple of quick questions. I'm just gonna pull the first one here off Slido and I guess it it refers partly to that piece you were talking about about prevalence and severity, but is it more of a welfare problem for one animal to be lame for 100 days or for 100 animals to be lame for 1 day each? Well, it's welfare is an issue for the individual.

So for that one animal that's lame for 100 days, then obviously that is the biggest welfare problem for that animal. For each of the other animals that are lame for maybe 1 day, it would depend on the severity of that, how quickly it receives treatment, and the individuals suffering. Of that particular animal.

But this is inherent in the problem that we were trying to grapple with. And I guess any one of you in here might have a different answer to that question. But what we tried to do by having expert consensus is try to understand what most people think is the answer to that question.

Yeah, and I guess linked to that then individuals suffer not populations or species, given that, surely it's the number of centres of sentences that matter rather than the percentages of populations. So I think you've, I think you've probably answered that one. And is there a risk that industry contributors were biassed, for example, due to commercial conflicts?

I think it's probably a risk that all our experts were biassed in some way or other by their knowledge, their experience, but what we aim to do by having a broad range, I don't think that was that was true just of industry. They may have had commercial conflicts, but we all have our own biases. I think what we tried to do by having that mix of experts was to flatten that out a bit.

It is true that if we ran that again with a different group of experts, we might end up, I don't, I don't think we will be a million miles away from where we were. But it is, it is one of those issues that different people have different opinions and that's what expert consensus tries to deal with is to try to get away from individual variations. Every time we look at some of these species lists, somebody will say, why is that not there?

And that is because we all have our individual views on what's important. Were there any other results for you that you were surprised by? I think probably not.

Surprise as such, I think maybe the ranking of some of the things, but again, I think that probably comes down to the fact that I personally might have put some things higher up the list than the consensus reached. I think, I think the unanimity of the fact that everybody agreed that lack of knowledge was so even though we think we've had lots and lots of research, we've had lots of education, we've had lots of outreach activities, somehow we are still seeing the biggest issue is that. The knowledge is not in the hands of the people who need it and who are having these day to day interactions with the animals.

Excellent. Any quick questions from the floor? We've got one at the back, that then.

I am, I'm just interested whether you believe that . Given all the stuff that you looked at there and what I've heard today, do you feel society disproportionately target farmers from a welfare point of view in the broader context of animal keeping in the UK? And if we do think that.

Do we think it's fair to farmers as a veterinary profession that we highlight that all our animals in the UK all have welfare challenges to help the society have a bit better context for farmers because I think I personally feel as a farm that they get a rough deal on this. Yes, I think I broadly agree with you. I think we have traditionally been more concerned about farm animals for longer because that's really what you know, 50, 60 years ago triggered our thinking around animal welfare at all, at least put it into a framework and started moving.

So there's vastly more research and more legislation for farm animal welfare. I think laboratory animals are catching up fast actually as well. So there's a lot of legislation about laboratory animals, and one of the findings that You know, one of the things we debated was that pet rabbits are probably kept in worse conditions than laboratory rabbits.

So if you look at the evidence and the amount of space they have, so as, as people who care about animals as pet pet owners are not doing much better, but their motivation might be different. So understanding. What is good welfare for an animal is perhaps missing in their owner population.

I guess with farmers it's just a much more complicated picture because livelihoods are involved. Nobody has to have a pet, but you do have to, you do have to make a livelihood as a farmer, and we as a society have agreed that it's OK to eat animals and therefore animals are kept for food production and to blame the farmer when the pressures that come from us wanting cheaper food, as we've talked about today. The fact that we've agreed that it's OK to kill animals for food, I don't think it's fair.

No. So I think I agree with you. So there's just one more question here which I'm gonna take just now, but I'll possibly share some of the answer about what will you do next with your results, Cathy, do you want to touch on a couple of outputs that you're hoping to get out of it as a research group?

Yeah, so we have 4 papers in draught form at the moment, which will be out hopefully soon, once I've finished that. There's probably, well, it depends on timing, but you know, it'd be lovely to be able to publish all of it. I don't know whether we'll get there, but that's at the moment, the publication, and then I think there are discussions with the AWF about how that might impact on educational priorities, research priorities, and other things.

So that's certainly what we'll be doing with it, as a group of trustees, we'll be taking the results from the study, and looking at setting our research priorities as the Animal Welfare Foundation. Ultimately, that's why we undertook the study in the first place to really look at where the key priorities were to help us create a strategy, for the next few years going forwards in terms of the types of research that we're gonna fund. And Cathy, we're gonna let you escape, if everybody could put their hands together and thank Kathy once more.