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Good morning everyone, welcome students, fish 
farmers and eminent guests. My name is Piotr

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Eljasik and I am a researcher working at the West 
Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin

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and for the Polish Society for Conservation 
Genetics LUTREOLA. First of all please accept

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my sincere apologies for not joining you in person 
today, but as you watch this I am probably turning

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in my bed from one side to another. Today I have 
a pleasure to present you some of the outcomes

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of our project development and validation of 
morphological and biometric welfare indicators for

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basa fish in the Dong Thap, which together 
with DTCC we were running for the last few months.

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The project was funded by University of Stirling 
and Open Philanthropy program with a bigger aim

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to improve farmed fish welfare in Asia. Before we 
move to our project I will take my chance here at

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the workshop to remind you or to introduce you to 
animal welfare concepts. So animal welfare means

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physical and mental state of an animal in relation 
to the conditions in which it lives and dies.

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Which in practice means that we should provide the 
animals five freedoms all of those five you can

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see here. So freedom from hunger and thirst, 
freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain,

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injury and disease, freedom to express normal 
behaviour and freedom from fear and distress.

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Animal welfare is also closely linked to 
animal health and the health and well-being

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of people. And also the sustainability 
of socioeconomic and ecological systems,

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which is mostly covered by this one health or 
sometimes called one welfare concept. Again,

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turning it into simple words, 
in practice it means that poor

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environmental conditions translates to poor 
animal condition, and this will translate to

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the worsening health of humans. What we 
really want to do is to turn it around,

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so with good environmental conditions, animals, in 
our case fish, will feel better in the environment

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and that will translate into better health of 
us humans. As a matter of fact 79% of customers

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in Europe think that animal welfare matters, and 
the overarching aim of our project and many other

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projects is to make 100% people of all around 
the world think that animal welfare matters.

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It is good to remember that we are at the 
very beginning of introducing fish welfare

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in Vietnam. As you may know, animal welfare 
is a new phenomenon and even the term "animal

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welfare" itself does not exist in your language. 
Therefore we see many challenges but also a lot

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of opportunities to familiarize Vietnamese 
aquaculture with animal welfare standards.

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There are many things that we can look at that 
reflect welfare, and they are known as welfare

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indicators, so something that indicates how 
healthy the fish is. These can be as simple and

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obvious as mortality, or as complicated as gene 
expression in the laboratory. All the indicators

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that we can assess on site so on farm are called 
operational welfare indicators, and our project

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aimed to develop such indicators. So you may ask 
us how do we do that? First we have to select and

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screen biometric welfare indicators, then we 
do some pictures of fish from different farms.

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Currently we are at the second step, 
so processing of all of those files.

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Next we will need to validate the outcome 
and of course do some practical testing.

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But before we actually started, we kind of 
wanted to know if these indicators will be

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of any interest for basa fish farmers. Therefore 
we have conducted surveys asking whether they be

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interested in using such indicators, and also what 
are the main challenges that they face daily. Well

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not surprisingly, all of the farmers said that 
they are not familiar with the fish welfare term,

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which gives us a field to introduce them to it. 
And when we asked them what are the main causes

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of fish loss at their farm? One of the most 
common answers was the poor quality of seed;

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so the fish they use for stocking. But also 
we had some answers about poor water quality,

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diseases and parasites, and in some cases even 
the extreme weather events such as floods.

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When we ask them what are the main 
changes they faced in the last five years,

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most of them again answered with a decreased stock 
quality. But also some of them experienced climate

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change, decreased water quality, and some of them 
were forced to start vaccination of the fish,

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or they chose to vaccinate the fish. Finally 
when we ask them if they will be interested in

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using visual scoring system for their fish, 
to assess the condition, most of them they

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were interested and they thought it could be a 
useful tool for them, but of course they need

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some training on how to use such scoring system. 
So in a scale 1 to 10 the average answer was 8.8,

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which give us some motivation to develop 
operational welfare indicators. So currently,

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as I said, we finished the data collection 
and we are at the point of data analysis,

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which is very time consuming and very demanding 
because we have roughly around a thousand pictures

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to analyse, order and score. But here are some 
highlights of what we are currently doing,

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so in the first row you can see fish with 
different level of head discoloration.

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Starting with a very nice natural colour of fish 
and then some of the individuals with clear red

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spots. In the second row we have fish with 
no pectoral fin damage, through some damage,

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and up to severe damage of pectoral fin. And the 
last third row shows you a Caudal fin damage,

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again starting with no damage, through some 
stages of damage, and up to a severe damage

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of caudal fin. So the challenge now is to score 
all of those features that we've identified,

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and as a result we will deliver a practical 
book with pictures to assess basa fish welfare.

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And we want to give you, the practitioners, 
fish farmers a tool to improve your stock.

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This is just how it's going to look in theory,

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but it I hope it comes in practice very 
soon. So thank you for your attention and

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I wish you a very successful second part of 
the workshop. And if you have any questions,

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you can either contact me or one of my colleagues 
who are present at the workshop today. Thank you.