Monday 29 June 2015

Animal Welfare Science: An IFAW Workshop

This month Nat, Heather and Fritha from The Jeanne Marchig International Centre for Animal Welfare Education and Scotland's Rural College were delighted to visit Cape Cod and the headquarters of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).


Azzedine Downes, President and CEO of IFAW attended the workshop

JMICAWE and IFAW have already established a strong partnership through collaborative teaching initiatives on our online MSc in International Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law, and the development of an interactive foundation course on animal welfare and ethics which has now been rolled out to all IFAW staff. This course was designed to develop a consistent level of knowledge about animal welfare science, and a common understanding of IFAWs ethics. If you are interested in our Master's programme, more can be found here: http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?cw_xml=details.php&id=788
 
 
Our recent visit to Boston built upon this successful initiative to bring a greater depth of analysis and evaluation to IFAWs campaigns and position statements and to emphasise the importance of a solid scientific foundation when developing animal welfare policy and campaigns. Topics covered included ‘evidence-based arguments and why they matter’, ‘good and bad science’, and ‘writing effective science-based communications’.
Additionally participants had the opportunity to explore their own personal ethics and discover the commonalities that have evolved into a cohesive ethical stance for IFAW. Feedback from IFAW staff has been very positive, recognising that the workshop allowed for critical analysis of IFAW’s positions and reaffirmation of beliefs in the work done by IFAW.
We feel very priviledged to have been able to run this workshop in collaboration with IFAW and would like to thank everyone who helped to make it such a success.
 

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