Wageningen Week 3: Sam

What content will you be able to contribute to this community of scholars/learners?

The main topic I have in mind is the animal welfare and conditions that different countries keep. For example, while here in the Netherlands, I have noticed that the big open pastures that they keep most of their farm animal life in, which are similar to the conditions I saw in Brasil. Another factor is that in many cases, both of these countries keep a mix of the farm animals co-existing amongst one and another, in the same habitat. This differs from the U.S. a great deal, seeing as those most of our animals are kept separate, in much smaller places. I also noticed differences even in small areas where animals, such as pigs, are kept versus our own. Some of these areas had saw dust type bedding. The chickens were raised in communal fairly large cages, in some cases, the mother hen left in with the chicks as an influence. I have not experienced these conditions in the U.S., in comparison, most of our swine facilities smell much worse, seem less sanitary (you had to take a shower before entering the facility and only wear their clothing here) and our chickens are often kept in very small cages. The overall animal welfare concerns is other countries seem much higher.

How do you view yourself and your experiences contributing to this community of scholars/learners?

I see myself developing another learning module and poster with a better idea of what my overall aim and objective is. Thinking of ideas that I can incorporate into the class ANSC 199 while working on the program here in the Netherlands now has allowed me to recognize topics that I can bring back to incorporate in the class. I am already brainstorming ideas for which parts of specific courses I have taken, such as AnSc 100, this type of learning module based on animal welfare could fit into. I feel that this learning module can bring many new ideas to our farm animal systems.

How do you think your experiences will impact your own approach to or achievement of learning in ANSC courses once you return in the fall?

I believe I will be able to develop a module more thoroughly this fall, seeing as though I have already presented my past module in a class and was able to gain feedback on how my approach work, based on the extensive feedback that I received from students. I feel that there are many classes where a module based on animal welfare would work, especially production classes that I am not as familiar with yet, but may be a place where I can propose new ideas to up and coming animal producers. I plan to research whether facilities that cater to animal welfare have more efficient numbers when it comes producing these animals. I feel from the research that I have overlooked thus far, this will likely be the case, seeing as though animals growth is typically stunted or slowed when they are under the stressed conditions that we keep them in.

Contribution to the Handbook for Wageningen:

Buy a discount pass for the trains. I believe it is around 25 euros now in 2007 and I just learned about it, after already having bought many train tickets. Apparently it can save you up to 40% on purchases and I definitely feel it is worthwhile! Train prices can add up! In order to purchase this pass you need a picture of yourself to give them, I discovered this yesterday when I tried to buy one.

Other Thoughts:

As Allison has described, we began our Animal Behavior and Environment course this past Monday, June 4th. I am really enjoying it so far and I feel much of the material will be directly applied to my planned future career with training, animal husbandry and rescue for marine mammals. After researching all week, we finally got to take a trip out to the zoo yesterday and it was really exciting to finally observe our monkeys! There is a 3 ½ week old baby that the zookeeper asked we focus our research question on. Apparently there was a baby last year but the male, who helps rear the infant (unlike most macaques) took the infant for too long and did not return it to her mother in time to nurse, so she died of starvation. Therefore, they asked us to study how much time the infant spends with the mom and the father. We already noticed the father taking the infant away for short periods of time on Friday, which makes us slightly nervous, because now we almost feel as if this infant monkey’s life is on our shoulders. Hopefully all works out, Barbary macaques are really amazing animals to observe thus far.