Animal welfare is a key social concern that must be addressed to safeguard the future viability of food animal industries. Veterinarians play a special role in educating their clients about practices that promote good animal welfare, and are increasingly expected to provide professional opinion, expert advice, and training on standards of animal care (AVMA-FVE-CVMA, 2011). Reports from the American Veterinary Medical Association and Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges (AVMA AAVMC, 2010), North American Veterinary Medical Education Consortium (NAVMEC, 2011), Federation of Veterinarians of Europe (2013), and the World Animal Health Organization (OIE) ad hoc Working Groups on Animal Welfare (2002) and Veterinary Education (2012) include animal welfare among the core competencies required of graduating veterinarians. Despite this recognized need for veterinary participation in animal welfare, veterinary colleges have been slow to integrate this subject into their curriculum. As animal welfare is a relatively new competency expected of the veterinarians, few resources are available for veterinary colleges to create instructional materials for teaching this topic.
The development of this website and the content within was funded in part by the following grant: USDA-HEC 2017-70003-26376. This large-scale grant is designed to develop curriculum materials to strengthen animal welfare education in the veterinary curriculum, with emphasis on important food animal species. Our specific objectives are to:
Objective 1. Develop an online 1-credit basic animal welfare course for freshman level veterinary students
Objective 2. Create electronic problem-based-learning case studies for food production animals and an online repository to store these cases
Objective 3. Develop two 1-week experiential courses (clinical rotations) focused on assessing swine and dairy cattle welfare for senior veterinary students
Objective 4. Create and validate effective multiple-choice examination questions to evaluate student competency in animal welfare principles and practices
Objective 5. Develop an online navigational plan of existing educational opportunities to facilitate veterinary student specialization in animal welfare