Keynote speakers
Dr Beth Ventura (University of Lincoln, UK)
Title: Animal welfare: The elephant in the room is us

Professor Lars Chittka (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)

UFAW’s Animal Welfare Conference was held online on June 20-21 2023 with a view to minimising our environmental impact, and to facilitate participation from a wide global audience. We were therefore delighted to have 467 delegates register from 63 countries.

The conference programme included 39 submitted talks and more than 90 posters covering a broad range of species and topics. Delegates listened to talks from two keynote speakers:

·       Dr Beth Ventura (University of Lincoln, UK) explored how we can improve the likelihood that discoveries about animal welfare are actually implemented in her talk ‘Animal Welfare: the elephant in the room is us’.

·       Professor Lars Chittka (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) spoke about his work testing whether bees and other insects have emotion-like states in his talk ‘Bee Sentience and its Welfare Implications’.

Delegates also heard from the 2023 winners of the UFAW Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Welfare Science (Professor Per Jensen, Linköping University, Sweden), and the Early Career Researchers of the Year (Dr Sara Hintze, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria and Dr Jordan Hampton, Universities of Melbourne and Murdoch, Australia), who were presented with their awards during the event.

Abstracts for all the talks and posters can be found on this webpage, whilst recordings of the talks can be found on our YouTube channel here[LD1] . As of October 2023, the recordings of the talks are free to view, but if you can, please consider making a donation to support Science in the Service of Animal Welfare.

Contact Details:

Dr Stephen Wickens, UFAW, The Old School, Brewhouse Hill, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, AL4 8AN, UK.

Tel: +44 (0) 1582 831818; Website: www.ufaw.org.uk; Email: events@ufaw.org.uk