In September 2011 a UFAW-SAWI research scholarship was given to Roi Mandel to carry out research on the welfare of dairy cattle under the supervision of Dr Eyal Klement of the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This work, now completed, supports the inclusion of grooming brush use, and possibly other low-resilience behaviours, into automated health monitoring systems, to better detect disease progression and recovery.
Since completing his research, Roi has continued to lead and teach the Animal Welfare courses at the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine. He teaches both first year veterinary students and veterinarians who are pursuing a Masters degree in Public Health. An interesting and novel approach to Roi’s teaching involves channelling animal welfare information to the general public using short YouTube videos created by the students themselves and you can view them here:
Roi has also had a number of papers published relating to his work, including Detection of lameness in dairy cows using a grooming device and Environmental enrichment of dairy cows and calves in indoor housing. You can read more about Roi’s work here .
This is the first major animal welfare science project that UFAW has funded in Israel and we hope to use the UFAW SAWI fund to further establish animal welfare science as a discipline in Israel, to address both local and global welfare issues. If you would like to support animal welfare in Israel, you can make a donation online here.
