Tim Wiese - Presentation transcript. Right. Hello everyone. Thank you all so much for taking the time to come here and participate in this discussion with me on fish welfare. As Dave introduced me earlier, my name is Tim Wiese and I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Aquaculture all the way back in Scotland at the University of Stirling. Now my research has entirely revolved around all things regarding fish welfare and today I'd like to have a nice little dive into various concepts and principles, all things relating to fish welfare so that we can perhaps help better understand what approaches we can take towards taking on welfare in a scientific context. So in the interest of time, I am starting with the assumption that most of us, at least on some level here, can agree that there's growing surmounting evidence for varying levels of fish sentience or other animal welfare sentience that's become apparent within our scientific community. And because of that there's the oneness on us, the importance of taking some responsibilities and learning to nurture and protect that welfare to the best of our abilities. The question that I would instead like to really dive into here is what I believe a lot of questions that pop into all of our minds when we first hear that word welfare. And those sorts of questions are well what do we actually mean when we say welfare? What's the difference between welfare and health? If there's not really much of a difference, do we really need to use that term or should we try and expand other ways? So it sounds like a very obvious straightforward question, but it's an essential question to ask, because how do you define welfare to yourself will completely determine how you then assess welfare, or incorporate it into your research. And it's not an easy question to ask by any means, and a lot of people fail to ask themselves that question properly or even avoid it entirely and for good reason. So whether you use the phrase animal welfare, well-being or quality of life, what we're talking about here is something that goes beyond the notion of just the animal's health. It's something that is ultimately concerned with the experiences that the animal has from the perspective of the animal themselves. Now I'm sure anyone here that has spent most of their lives dealing with plastic veterinary or biological functioning and health-wise realises the massive challenge that comes with trying to tackle something like that in a scientific context. And it's not just pertaining to that alone, you can have the same issue if you try to speak to a friend, or even with any human conversation where you're trying to figure out how their well-being is. They might provide some valuable insights. They might be honest and share their feelings with you, say yeah, I've had a terrible week or whatever, or they say the feeling that in some way or another. You could be the best psychologist or psychiatrist in the world, you will not walk away from that conversation with a measured objective score of that person's well-being. So that's the same challenge that we're facing with animals now. So while we can appreciate that welfare is something that is actually real, these subjective experiences that we ultimately care about are also something that's quite inaccessible to us and that's what the ultimate goal of welfare is anyway. So it's dealing with something that can't be measured and certainly not measured in the same way as say versus height or blood pressure or any of these other physiological parameters. And so us as a scientific community, we're faced with the fascinating challenge of trying to keep as close as we can to this subjective experience while never being able to actually capture it in the first place. So when we're dealing with something like animal welfare that can't be directly quantified, we're inevitably forced to tackle something that is a human concept. It's an idea and it was real, it's still this matter of us somehow trying to find a methodical, robust, scientific way of assessing something that is unavoidably influenced by every single one of our own moral frameworks, our own value systems and what each of us might think matters the most for an animal's well-being. And that could be either the same for a lot of people or it could differ. And it doesn't matter whether it's the welfare of a human being, a fish, a bird or whichever animal. It's a incredible challenge that we all have to try and find a way of coming to an agreement on. And so that's one of the interesting points with this matter of tackling welfare in a scientific context is that we as a human and as a species, hasn't always been great at agreeing on what matters most to things, much less with welfare. So in understanding broadly what matters the most for welfare, there are three different but overlapping views of welfare that have been established within the scientific community. Now I'm assuming these will all sound relatively familiar once I start speaking about them, so I'll quickly outline them and give some reasons for why there's some overlap, as well as why there's some issues with just dealing with any single view in isolation. So the first one we have here is this functions based view. And this is all surrounding the view that what you're solely concerned with is the biological functioning of the animal. And that's essentially its physical health. And this tends to form a large part of what most people around the world conceptualise and understand welfare to be. And it's not surprising that that's the case because a large part of what welfare concerns tend to revolve around are directly measurable variables like disease injuries, or mortalities. Now this strict definition of... Assuming that you take a strict definition where you only view welfare within this concept, it focuses on concerns that ultimately have very little to do with whether or not the animal is actually suffering, whether there's any perceived pain or pleasure or hunger or any of those matters, it is solely focusing on the functional state of the animal and whether or not you can continue to live and reproduce. One of the challenges with adopting that solely functions based view that we're talking about here is that there have been many examples in scientific literature where animals can be in perfectly good health but still be perceived to have some aspects of suffering. And a good example for that is when you have animals that spend their entire life being well looked after, well fed, but are in certain situations either because of their encloses or because of husbandry practices where they are restrained and prevented from performing innate behaviours like escape behaviours or evasive behaviours when they believe to perceive a predator. And so there's a lot of situations where even though the animal's quite fit healthy and even if the there isn't a predator that is causing risk, the animal would might still be perceived to be suffering because of that fear. And that sort of brings on to the second view here which is this feelings based approach. And this is what we touched on a bit earlier on. This is to do with what many considered the ultimate matter of concern for animal welfare. And many symptoms of poor welfare through this view, that fall under this category, is then that includes things like pain, fear, hunger, they've been suggested to have evolved naturally over time because they're valuable defense mechanisms that prevent the animal from dying or from actually coming into severe risks. So, because they're useful, there's a relatively safe assumption that at some level a large number of these animals that we're dealing with are capable of experiencing all of these effective states. So in the same way that adopting a solely functions based view presents some issues, adopting a solely feelings based view also presents some issues. The number one thing which touched on before is there is no empirical information that we are able to capture that will provide information on this matter because it is such a hidden variable in terms of what we are able to directly capture and measure. And we also have to recognise how closely linked this idea of these subjective experiences are to the biological functioning view as well. There's a lot of the times they tend to do an agreement with each other. If an animal has suffered a severe injury, most people would likely agree that it's biologically functioning and being compromised. And in terms of its suffering, if it's lost a limb or a pin or a major part of its body, it's probably also a pain. Now there are some interesting ones where those views are conflict with each other. And we had a good example here where I'll take it out of aquaculture and just think of someone you know that might be a habitual smoker. Now adopting a solely feelings based view, you would take this view of well, smoking causes pleasure, relieves some distress and the immediate lung damage caused by smoking is not that bad and then then you could even make the argument that solely on the feelings base that the pleasure that is gathered over time outweighs the pleasure or the suffering that happens later on, irrespective of the immense damage that's caused. So some people that adopt a solely feelings-based view may actually say, well cigarettes are a bonus for my welfare. And hopefully you can understand where that might be a pitfall. So then we go to the final view here, which is this nature-based view and this brings forward this notion that whatever is natural is inherently good. And this brings forward this idea that again, even if the animal's health is perfect, its welfare could be compromised if it isn't fulfilling the natural life that it ought to live. Now a common concern here is a similar one to the previous example outlined, which is this idea of an animal that can be well kept and well looked after but has evolved in innate drive to migrate somewhere or fly somewhere or swim somewhere, and even though it is far healthier and it has a much higher survival rate than its wild counterparts that are allowed to migrate and are free to move, in some ways many would view that as a compromised welfare because it is able to fulfil that desire and especially if that occurs throughout its entire life. So obviously again one of the issues here is the inherent biological nature of an animal is of course an important consideration for any animal's welfare. But living a natural life by no means guarantees that you are going to fulfil a whole range of other ethical concerns. Because a natural life tends to be full of predators, tends to be full of starvation, aggressive competition from other species, and so there's a lot of those that are of the previous two views would say is less compromised life welfare that's in conflict with that. So hopefully that gives a good idea of how most people here between all of these three views and conceptions that encompass the whole area of what we could possibly see welfare to be. Each of the views provides some valuable important guidelines, but they're not always in agreement with each other and you certainly cannot deal with one in isolation, to provide enough guidelines for defining, assessing, and improving animal welfare. Instead they all play an important role together. So unfortunately, as I said before, not all of us can agree on how we integrate all three of these together, because depending on our backgrounds, where we grew up, how we value different things, one person might believe that functional state is far more important, other people might believe that what is natural is far more important, and that's one of the major conceptual challenges that scientists are having to face now when it comes to welfare. And the question now is how on earth do we manage to do a robust balanced way of assessing the quality of life of another animal when we are unable to fully agree on which of these matter the most? And, as a starting point, one of my favourite analogies in that it's a mental framework here to go about tackling something like this, this challenge, comes from a lady named Marianne Dawkins and, she brings a wonderful equation of equating assessing the animal welfare to assessing the safety rating of a building and rather than measuring say its height So in other words here, instead of trying to score an animal's welfare by a single quantitative measure, we instead have to use a variety of different welfare indicators, not measures, indicators, to finally arrive at what we believe will be the safety rating of the animal's welfare. And if you're trying to reach a conclusion of the animal's welfare as a whole at any point, that ideally would require physiological, morphological and behavioural parameters, so that you can cover all of those three different views depending on the context that you are investigating. But the challenge we're still faced with here is again coming to an agreement on how we would use those different welfare indicators to arrive at that safety rating of the animal's welfare. And at the very least we know that we need to use an integrated approach that attempts to address all three of those views and the majority of the time, all three views will be in alignment and there won't be any conflict. It's a matter of finding a balance when they aren't and that's the biggest challenge that we're faced with. So now that we've gone through some important principles to help conceptualise how we would assess welfare, it's I think worth starting to talk about some examples of welfare indicators and how we might use them together. So first of all what exactly is a welfare indicator? It's a unique assessment of either the animal or its surrounding environment that provides any valuable information, qualitative or quantitative, that may eventually influence the animal's welfare state. Now operational welfare indicators are a smaller branch of that and those are just indicators that are practical enough for any farmer to use or any researcher to use on a routine basis without coming at much of a cost. Now as we mentioned before, the complex nature of welfare and all of these different conflicting views and how everything can be very context specific, species specific, it necessitates us to use a combination of these indicators. There is no such thing as a golden indicator that will tell you everything we need to know. And these indicators especially might be quite system specific. As some presentations earlier just now we're talking about the importance of transportation or those final moments leading up to slaughter or harvest. The indicators could differ quite greatly depending on what you're doing and the context behind it. Context is always king for this. So when determining what indicators to include for an assessment, they should at the very least fulfil the following theoretical and practical requirements. The first one which we talked a bit about already is that your list of OWIs should be exhaustive. And that means they must cover all of those three different views. But on the other hand, they should also be minimalist. So if you're using an indicator, there's no point in adding another indicator if it tells you something similar. And in the same breath, these indicators must not be reliant on one another. So how you interpret one indicator cannot be influenced by the interpretation of another one in your assessment. And as a whole, these OWIs can be classified in three different groups, and this will depend on how directly they are seen to be measuring the animal. And as you can see on the bottom here, that is either an animal-based measure, a environment-based measure, or a resource-based measure. Now, this most obvious group and class of welfare indicators that are called animal-based welfare indicators. They are all the indicators that involve observations directly of the animal that, like I said, physiological, morphological or behavioural. And for fish, this can include anything from deformities of the gill covers, the mouth, or the vertebrae, the conditions of the fins, skin, eyes, snout, jaw or operculum, the scale loss, handling trauma, infestations or diseases, and then of course behaviours which will of course depend on the species that you're involved with. Then we have more of the indirect welfare indicators or the environmental based welfare indicators. And these are observations made on the surrounding environment of the animal that can have influence on the animal's welfare. So even though these assessments actually have nothing directly to do with the animals themselves, they are equally important and a lot of the times have a lot more of a factor in determining the animal's welfare, because unlike these previous indicators with the animal-based, they are also called outcome-based because they've already happened. So if there's been a compromised state here that's been captured, it's already too late in a sense. Whereas these are often regarded as preventative measures, they're risk-based preventative measures. And so this can include anything from water quality parameters, severity of blooms, whether it's algae or any other microorganisms, total suspended solids, turbidity, heavy metals, any possible poisoning in the systems or even lighting. Similar to environmental-based are these resource-based indicators. And resource-based indicators, otherwise known as risk-based indicators, are again, not observations made on the animals. These are observations that are made on what might be posed risks posed or mitigated through husbandry practices or what staff are doing or what equipment's available, or what the enclosures current conditions are at. And in the same way and in the same sense with what I said just now about the environmental-based indicators, a lot of people tend to disregard these classes because they're not involving the animals directly. They are equally if not more important in many situations because they are what we can control by and large. And they are a lot of the times, the indicators that if we can control we don't even need to be concerned with the latter stages of the outcome-based stages. And this can include anything from staff training, fish handling, disease control, proper record keeping, to equipment maintenance, what steps are included during transportation to ensure that if something goes wrong, that it gets dealt with very quickly, and just basic treatment and handling procedures as well. So and there's actually what's worth mentioning is these two classes when I keep interchanging between environmental-based and risk-based, is that in some cases they're the same. So stocking density, enclosure maintenance, predation prevention through nets, these all fall under either category. So now that we have some examples of these indicators, we should probably try to figure out how we're going to choose which ones we want to include in our assessments. Now deciding on which welfare indicators or OWIs that you want to include in your assessment or within your research will depend entirely on the stage the production stage that you're dealing with whatever species you have and the specific goals that you have with your welfare assessments. So is your assessment just the routine monitoring of the animals to make sure that they're okay? Are your assessment during intensive practice like a crowding event or a grading event or treatment event? Or is this something that a certification scheme like GlobalGAP or ASC is doing when they're carrying out an audit? Now each of the OWIs, which I'll get to a bit more into later, they have their own strengths and weaknesses and those have to be acknowledged before you use them. And you remember that every OWI will only address certain aspects of welfare within certain contexts. Of course the assessment still needs to be practical enough to be carried out. And so like I said before, the list cannot be too exhaustive. So I'll finish off here with just saying a final remark on when you're choosing these indicators. If you're trying to come up with a welfare assessment that you have a score or a percentage or a threshold for what you might deem as acceptable or unacceptable, a lot of the times it's unavoidable and it's a requirement so that you can reach conclusions on your projects. But it's important to remember that the main bulk of what this presentation was about was about these three different views between what people value and what we see as important, which is the physical health of the animal, the feelings or whatever it might be experiencing, and then the natural lives of these animals. And any time that we reach a score that tries to reduce all of your assessments down to a single parameter or a single number, you inevitably are getting to that point where you have to make a subjective decision on what matters more. And the trick is making sure that you do that in as much of a very objective way as possible, minimising any bias and try to find a balance when doing that. I think that's pretty much it. Thank you very much.