Angela Wright
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Angela Wright is the assistant Lecturer in Animal Welfare and teaches on a variety of under-graduates courses at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. She is a biologist with a keen interest in all aspects of animal welfare.
Research
Angela's postgraduate research focuses in 2 distinct areas: animal welfare assessment and education. After a career as a Government scientist she returned to education, obtaining a Masters degree in Biology (Integrative Bioscience) from the University of Oxford before starting a PhD at the RVC in 2006.
Awareness of animal welfare and, more importantly, the significance of good animal welfare is growing substantially in both the UK and Europe; reflected in the UK by the recent Animal Welfare Act (Defra, 2006) where animal welfare is defined using the 'Five Freedoms' framework developed by the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC).
Set in this context the PhD has dual themes, with one key aspect focussing on the assessment of the welfare of pigs on British farms and the other on the teaching of animal welfare assessment in a veterinary context, and more specifically, to first-year veterinary students as part of their Animal Husbandry - Extra Mural Studies programme (AH-EMS).
Funded by BPEX, in accordance with their strategic priority # 2 for pig health and welfare this project aims to establish the current welfare status of the British pig herd. The key objectives are to:
- To develop validated protocols for the assessment of pig welfare;
- To train veterinary undergraduates in formal assessment of pig welfare;
- To survey the welfare of pigs on British farms in an epidemiological study, (allowing risk factors for welfare to be identified under farm conditions using a validated, repeatable, reliable and objective method and enabling long-term trends in welfare to be established and goals set).
- To provide participating farmers and BPEX with benchmarks for good welfare
Selected Publications
Wright, A. J., Powney, S. E., Nevel, M. & Wathes, C. M. (2009) Pig welfare assessment: Development of a protocol and its use by Veterinary undergraduates. Invited paper – in press Journal of Veterinary Medical Education
Wright, A. J., Green, D. M. & Kao, R. R. (2007) Analysing the Risk of a Bovine Brucellosis Epidemic in Great Britain Using the Cattle Tracing Scheme: Have we just been lucky so far? Proceedings of the British Society for Animal Science. 195