Acknowledgements Book of abstracts - Publicaties - Vlaanderen.be

Welcome address
One prerequisite for ensuring and improving the quality of life of animals is the development of
scientifically robust methods for assessing their welfare. There is little doubt that a pet owner who
pays a lot of attention to his individual animal may somehow know, almost intuitively, how this
particular animal fares and feels. The specific criteria used to come to this evaluation are hard to
pin-point. They tend to vary depending on the context, the animal and the pet owner. The emphasis
of this congress, however, is on the assessment of animal welfare at the level of the population
instead of the individual animal. For advising farmers on how to house and manage their animals,
for drafting and implementing legislation and codes of practice for the keeping of laboratory
animals, for improving the living circumstances of zoo animals, for labelling consumption products
according to the animal welfare status during production, … scientifically robust methods for
assessing the welfare of a group of animals are needed. The validity, reliability, applicability,
strengths and weaknesses of these methods ought to be discussed, peer-reviewed and – hopefully –
agreed upon by the relevant scientific community. The International Workshop on the Assessment
of Animal Welfare at Farm and Group Level (WAFL) offers this opportunity.
WAFL was organised first in Copenhagen in 1999, subsequently in Bristol in 2002 and in Vienna in
2005. The number of congress participants increased from about 40 in 1999 to 100 in 2002 and 195
in 2005 confirming the growing popularity of, and demand for this congress. With 28 oral
presentations, 62 posters and a small working group session during a single afternoon only, WAFL-
2005 continued to evolve from an international workshop to a proper scientific congress.
Respecting the 3-year interval, the Animal Sciences (Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries
Research - ILVO) and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (Ghent University - GU) joined forces to
organise the 4th edition of WAFL in Ghent from 10 to 13 September 2008. An enthusiastic
scientific committee was established including colleagues from other research institutes from
Flanders (K.U.Leuven) and the Netherlands (Wageningen University - WU and Utrecht University
- UU). The mission we set ourselves was to build on from WAFL-2005 by organising a low budget,
but high quality, scientific congress on the development, improvement, validation and application
of methods for assessing the welfare of farm, laboratory, zoo, and other animals housed and
managed in groups. Four specific topics, linked to this central theme, were added to the scientific
programme: Assessing emotional state and human-animal relations, Improving animal welfare by
adapting animals to their environment, Assessing health status of groups of animals in relation to
welfare, and Stakeholders’ views on animal welfare.
The 2.5-day scientific programme includes 5 keynotes lectures, 41 other oral presentations, 5
workshop sessions, and 102 poster presentations during which the current state of scientific
developments concerning the assessment of the welfare of groups of animals will be presented and
discussed. We realise that this scientific programme is packed to the brim but – given the specificity
of its scientific theme – we opted to respect the tradition of not having parallel sessions during the
congress. With the growing popularity of this congress (at least 230 participants) and the increasing
number of researchers wishing to present their results, however, this format may have to be revised
in future editions that will hopefully follow.
We would like to welcome all participants and wish you all a very interesting and memorable
congress that stimulates you in your current research or other interest in animal welfare. We also
hope that next to the varied scientific programme, you will find ample time to talk to colleagues, to
establish new contacts, … and to visit our wonderful hometown Ghent!
Frank Tuyttens (Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research, Animal Sciences)
Dominiek Maes (Ghent University, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine)
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