Naturally speaking. There's one correction to note in this podcast. In the interview, it mentions one of the three R's winners as Leslie Gilmore for her work on mice. However, the winner was Shana Henderson for her work improving the environment and welfare of laboratory rats.
We apologize for this error. Animal welfare is a hot topic these days. There are strong pushes towards vegetarian and vegan diets with welfare concerns among the key drivers. The public expects animals raised for food to be kept inhumane conditions.
But what about when it comes to the end of their lives? I'm Tia Ford. And I'm Kila McGinnis. Today we're joined by Dr.
Dorothy McKeegan, who is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine. Dr. McKeegan's research integrates techniques that incorporate animal behavior, physiology, and neurophysiology to investigate welfare issues primarily in farm animals. Among her areas of interest is Humane Slaughter, which is the topic that we'll be discussing with her today.
So Dorothy, thanks very much for joining us on Naturally Speaking. Could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself? I've been working here at Glasgow since 2005. I did my first degree here in Zoology back in the 90s.
And then a name is Seen Animal Welfare and Behavior in Edinburgh and PhD in the behavior of Lean Hand. What drew you to the area of Humane Slaughter for farm animals? When I was studying Zoology, I was interested in animal behavior and I wanted to apply that to Evia. I discovered the MSC in Animal Behavior in Edinburgh.
I thought that was a great way to apply that knowledge. And then I began working on farm animals and I was finding that area very impactful because of large numbers. And then within that area, there's lots of important area because we kill very large numbers of animals for food. So it must be challenging to take such an emotional issue and study it objectively.
What kinds of tools do you use to try to assess a process as abstract as dying and how the animal experiences it? Well, it is a really challenging area to work on. A key approach for us is to use the EEG or Electroencephalogram. This is a global measure of brain activity.
It helps us to work out the time to loss of consciousness, so the period of considering when the animal is still able to experience things. The EEG is very helpful in the sugar because it shows consistent changes in its characteristics in different awareness states for the animal. So we can use this techniques to examine features of the EEG at different times during the dying process and work out the likelihood of consciousness at different times. And then once we work out the period of considering we can use behavioral and physiological measures of welfare to look for evidence of suffering in this conscious period.
But it can be quite hard to interpret what the animal is showing us at that time. For some of our listeners who aren't quite sure, can you clarify what EEG means? The EEG is the Electroencephalogram. It's a global measure of brain activity that we measure on the surface of the brain.
And you might have heard of slow waves, sleep and brain waves. Basically this is the brain changing its activity in response to how awake and aware you feel. So when the animal is awake and aware that there's a certain type of activity we see when the animal is unconscious or asleep or under an aesthetic, we see a different type of pattern. And we can use these patterns to determine the likelihood of consciousness.
And more recently we've been using drug interventions to see if behavior changes with administration of pain relief, for example during a killing process, which may indicate pain is experienced during that process if we see changes. We're also developing methods of operating conditioning where we can train the animal to tell us to indicate by operating a lever or some other piece of machinery to tell us if they wish to leave a situation and we can apply that as some of the aspects of the killing process to gain insights into their actual experience. Some may argue that the mere fact that we're researching humane killing is an oxymoron and that we should all just be vegetarians or vegans. Having worked in this area for so long, what's your personal take on that argument?
Well I take the view that welfare is most important and I have no fundamental objection to the use of animals for food. But I think we owe them a good life and a good day. However I feel respect other viewpoints on this and I enjoy being challenged in these discussions. It's a very controversial area.
I do agree that our use of animals currently is profligate and also problematic for climate change. I think we do have to eat less meat, whatever happens, but I personally have no objection to that use of animals. Otherwise I guess I wouldn't work in the area I do. And I think that although it's not an easy area to work in and some people don't really want to talk about, we do kill a huge number of animals so it's an important area of welfare research.
Absolutely. And I would guess that improving the way that we slaughter animals for human consumption is probably more expensive. What methods have you come across that would consider the most humane and also practical for slaughterhouse system implement? Well there's quite a lot on gas stunning and other methods of stunning that cause changes in animals in vitamin that cause loss of consciousness gradually.
These are fairly humane but they're more expensive to install and run than some existing systems like electrical stunning is gas the same as decompression. So no it's not the same so with a gas stunning system you're putting animal in a container of some kind that you're filling it with a gas and that gas normally has a limited amount of oxygen in it or you're adding CO2 to your design aesthetic so you're causing animals to lose consciousness. With decompression the animal goes into a container and you gradually pull air out so it's the animals going up to high altitude which causes it to pass out cause it to lose consciousness again from lack of oxygen. So if you're on a plane and they say you know if your pressure drops or it's a mass will appear in front of your face and that you're a mass for helping others that's because under low atmospheric pressure you lose consciousness quickly and without too much suffering.
So it's a good potentially good way to lose consciousness so we're interested in applying it as a stunning method for animals. I assume the first slaughterhouse is actually going to implement this. It needs to be cost effective for them and so either it needs to be subsidized by the government or the cost is passed on to the consumer. If you can't tell I'm an economist and in economics we talk a lot about the fact that animal welfare is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it.
So where do you think the line is between cost-effective methods that you were just describing and increasing the price of food such as consumers are the ones paying for it? Well again I think the moment we pay too little for animal products to become used to this but I think there's many improvements in welfare that could be carried out that don't make products unaffordable but I appreciate that might depend on the person's income and so on. I think perhaps a combination of government subsidy to get these systems up and running and then consumers paying a bit more could be the answer to keep it affordable but still have these improvements happening. I think this willingness to pay for welfare idea is notoriously hard to measure and it's also unreliable when people are asked to pay more for welfare they do the right thing and say they are but this doesn't really translate into their behaviour at the point of purchase.
So it's very difficult to study this and to actually work out what the consumer will actually pay for. People do expect strong concern about animal welfare although killing part of farming is not something many consumers want to talk about. You've mentioned the term humane slaughter. Can you clarify what you mean by humane?
I think it's not a very well defined term. We tend to use it in the area of welfare science to mean sort of high welfare method. I think initially it was meant to be something that you would be okay to do to a human. There doesn't really apply here in a slaughter context.
I think that's where it came from. But certainly we tend to use it as meaning high welfare, acceptable, avoiding unnecessary suffering. I don't know whether it means with no suffering at all because it's quite difficult to eliminate all suffering especially in some of these slaughter contexts. When you talk about suffering that's when you're going back to those measures of on the EEG and how the animal is responding to its environment.
So there's various ways animals can suffer in the period of consciousness. If the killing method is not instantaneous, some killing methods are instantaneous. So for example electrical stunning basically applies in electrical current to the brain and basically switches consciousness off instantaneously if the current is sufficient which is great. But quite often to achieve that we have to handle animal in a way that's very stressful and negative for it.
So we're kind of winning on the losing consciousness side but we're losing on the handling side. Whereas methods like gas stunning there's no negative handling. The animal just goes into the gas and it's transport container. But then there's a period of time that it experiences its own loss of consciousness.
And during that time the animal might experience breathlessness, potentially other feelings like fear and even pain in some cases if the gas concentrations are in a certain way very high CO2 for example is painful to inhale. So there's a range of experiences that could happen in that phase and we try to use behavioral indicators and physiological indicators that give us some indication for that like to be happening. But we can never really know what it would be animals experiencing and we're trying to say using these operatic methods to get a more direct indication of the animal's experience. Dorothy recently gave a talk on this particular subject as part of the Three R's symposium which was hosted by the University of Glasgow and the Beetson Institute.
So for listeners not familiar with the term Three R's this refers to reduction replacement and refinement which are the goals animal ethics drive towards. Could you maybe describe the importance of this concept and what the symposium was all about? So the Three R's are a set of ethical principles that were specifically determined or invented to apply to use of animals in research by Russell and Barchback in the 1950s with actually having their 60 year birthday this year. So replacement is this idea that we're possible in research we shouldn't use animals we should always use alternatives so we're possible we should replace.
And if replacement isn't possible and we must use animals it's unavoidable we should reduce our animal use in terms of how many animals we use to the minimum meaningful number so that's the reduction. And the final R is refinement where we should ensure that any harm is due cause to this minimum number of animals that we must use. They're minimized with optimal housing and use of analgesia and other types of good practices in our research to minimize the number of procedures they go through and so on. So they come in that order replacement reduction and refinement and the symposium is showcasing research and husbandry methods and innovation that promote the Three R's in research.
Within the Glasgow community. It's great. Was this attended by students and researchers like that? Yes a few of my master's students came along and there was a lot of animal technicians and care staff there because they're one dealing with animals everyday and the university has a Three R's prize which is open to anyone where they can explain how they've applied a Three R's principle to improve animal welfare in research.
And this year one of their prizes is won by Leslie Gilmer a member of technical staff who come up with a refined way of improving the husbandry practices of a nice in their facility. So it really is open to everyone that works with animals in research. The prize was won by a research group who are doing some very cool cell culture of neurons so they're trying to create a cell culture that can mimic spinal cord features like a spinal cord injury without having to use animal models. So that's really cool as well.
And you also help coordinate the master's program in animal welfare science ethics and law on which we had a podcast back in December 2015. How has interest in uptake in the programs developed over the years? So yes a popular program we have 19 students this year. We had 23 last year so it's kind of hovering around the low 20s for now.
We have students from a range of backgrounds coming in from science background sometimes law even has some philosophy backgrounds coming in as well. And the aim of the program is to give these students a real grounding in the scientific ethical and legal aspects of animal welfare in abroad sense. We know from other students coming through the course in the past it's a stepping stone for them to go in perhaps do further research with PhD to go into practical jobs in animal care in laboratories or zoos or other animal facilities. And also it's a gateway to working with NGOs and even governments so it really is trying to give a broad grounding and open a lot of doors for students to follow their particular area of interest.
Are there any other welfare initiatives or research at the University of Glasgow you'd like to tell us about? Well something which has started working on which is new for me is that we're now looking at CUMaine killing of laboratory animals. So the moment laboratory rodents which are the most widely used type of laboratory animal are killed using carbon dioxide exposure to carbon dioxide gas which has some welfare issues linked with it. But despite 20, 30 years of efforts to try and find a better replacement for that there hasn't been one found weird examining a new approach to gradual decompression as a possible alternative to carbon dioxide.
We've shown this method as humane and poultry for slaughter and a new postdoc Dr. Jasmine Clarkson who's going to be working on this. We just started but if it does prove to be better than CO2 that could make a difference to how laboratory animals are killed throughout the world. Well thanks very much for joining us to do Dorothy and thank you for listening to Naturally Speaking.
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