Livestock Welfare

Tracey's research interests include:

• Improving health of livestock (e.g. mastitis, lameness, Johne’s in cattle, scrapie in sheep)
• Role of animal health, fitness and survival on greenhouse gas emission
• Improving sustainability of farm enterprises
• The development of sustainable breeding goals and improvements to national genetic evaluations
• Merging and mining of national data to create and understand the biology of novel phenotypes so that the livestock industry can measure, monitor and manage their performance.

The Golde lab’s current focus is development of vaccines for viral infections of livestock that induce a strong cellular immune response to compliment the anti-virus antibody response induced using present vaccine formulations. We use vaccine vectors derived from various viruses including adenovirus and vaccinia virus to redesign the vaccine payload to be delivered in a manner that induces the critical cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) response. This response kills virus infected cells and arrests the spread of virus within the body and between animals.

Malcolm's background is in human and animal physiology and he has sought to apply this discipline to understanding "stress" in animals particularly livestock in a commercial agricultural setting and how this relates to their welfare status.

Francoise is a Senior Research at SRUC, and her main research interest is the development of scientific approaches for the study of animals as whole sentient beings (i.e. as subjects rather than objects), bringing insights from philosophy of mind and social psychology and anthropology into the study of animal emotion. In collaboration with colleagues from SRUC and other institutes, Francoise has developed and validated a methodology for the study of animal expressivity (body language) and subjective experience, generally referred to as ‘Qualitative Behaviour Assessment’ (QBA).

Vicky is a senior research scientist in the Department of Agriculture, Horticulture and Engineering Sciences. Her research interests include:

Karen is a Principal Research Scientist leading a group working on pathogenic mycobacteria at Moredun. Her current research interests are in the areas of molecular pathogenesis, identification of biomarkers for diagnosis and infection, bacterial genomics and transcriptomics and molecular epidemiology. The ultimate research goal of the group is to improve diagnosis and control of Johne’s disease through a range of multi-disciplinary approaches.

Rupert is an environmental / soil scientist with expertise in risk modelling and exposure assessment. He is Scinece Group Leader of Information and Computational Sciences at the James Hutton Institute.  In his current position, Rupert uses risk-based methods to aid decision making and management of specific problems. Such methods have wide applicability and Rupert has used them for evaluation of both human and ecological problems; from finding appropriate ways to reduce dietary exposures to heavy metals, through to managing peat erosion under given climate change scenarios

Simon is a senior researcher in Animal Behaviour and Welfare and Animal and Veterinary Sciences. His main research interest lies in understadning the causes and consequences of individiual differences in social behaviour (pigs) and the response to human handling (beef cattle). Alongside colleagues, his research also addresses long-standing welfare issues by assessing the role that selective breeding can play in producing animals more suited to the environments in which they are housed.

Mike is a Professor of Livestock Informatics and Team Leader for Animal Breeding & Genomics at SRUC. His main research area of interest is dairy cattle breeding and identification of appropriate selection goals that meet as many stakeholders requirements as possible. The number of traits incorporated into the selection goal for all species is increasing which brings challenges when traits have unfavourable correlations. Of particular note is the mobilization of body energy by dairy cows - some is desirable since it adds to efficiency in both economic and environmental terms.

Alistair is Chair of Animal Behaviour & Welfare at SRUC, with a primary focus on understanding the biology of positive welfare using behaviour as a starting point, but also using other disciplines and techniques as applicable including physiology, neurobiology, molecular biology and genetics. His team are also interested in the causes and consequences of ‘positive’ behaviour such as play in farm animals and for this have been studying differences between individuals and litters of pigs.