Interesting Animal Welfare Conference 2016

While searching out information relative to The Brachycephalic Issue I came across this conference:

The First International Conference on Human Behaviour Change for Animal Welfare

As they state on the conference info page:

"The root cause of much animal suffering is human behaviour. However, traditional approaches to improving animal welfare have focussed on providing a service, such as accessible veterinary treatment, or campaigning for people to change their consumer habits. The understanding of why people do what they do, don’t do what you’d like them to, and more often than not do not change their behaviour, is the holy grail of anyone with something to sell, a campaign to promote or a desire to improve the world. For this reason human behaviour change has been studied by experts in marketing, psychology, development, and health and education programmes – understanding human behaviour is important for anyone with an interest in helping the world to be a better place for humans or animals."

My bolding in the preceeding highlights the nature of common questions underlying many dog health and welfare issues - i.e. the animal problems/ issues stem from human attitudes, psychology, societal and cultural differences, etc.

It is exciting to see this initiative and we will keep an eye on their developments.