The Campbell Centre had a wonder time hosting the 2025 North American Regional Meeting of the International Society of Applied Ethology (ISAE). This meeting brings together ISAE members – students, researchers, and faculty – to share their work, collaborate, and learn from one another. The 2025 meeting featured 27 speakers, plus two excellent keynote speakers, as well as 42 poster presentations. Overall, the meeting represented 51 institutions across North America.
Presentation Videos:
We are happy to be able to share recordings from the conference on our YouTube channel here. Thank you to all our presenters for a wonderful and engaging conference!
Keynote Speakers:
Day 1: Invisible harm: how our blind spots reveal unanswered questions in animal welfare
(followed by lunch with grad students)
Professor Cassandra Tucker
https://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/cassandra-tucker
Concerns about animal welfare are rooted in ethical considerations for how we, as a society, house and manage animals we use for food or other human purposes. As a result, how we view animal welfare considerations varies with our perspectives, beliefs and values. In my work as a researcher interested in animal welfare and generating knowledge to inform best practice on farms, I have encountered blind spots in these considerations. These blind spots are my own as well as those of farmers, caregivers and other stakeholders. Rather than offering a comprehensive list, I will focus on four types of blind spots that I believe obscure harm but also serve as a source of information. Indeed, my experience has been that some of our blind spots can reveal unanswered questions and point to areas that are ripe for further investigation and action. The first blind spot that meets these criteria is “out of sight, out of mind”. When engaging in this way of looking away, we underestimate damage to parts of the animal’s body that are not easily seen by humans (e.g. disbudding or castration wounds) or miss behaviors that are performed at times of day or on a scale that we, as humans, do not easily recognize (e.g. abnormal behaviors). The second type of blind spot is what I call “wrapped in positivity” where we choose an optimistic interpretation of an animals’ response (e.g. categorize an abnormal oral behavior as cute or funny rather than concerning) or rationalize how we house or manage cattle as being what is best for them. My experience is that topics in this category range from easily addressed to deeply ingrained. The third category I describe as “beyond imagination”, where the scale of change needed to address the concern is so immense that it is difficult to envision it. Indeed, incrementalism is common in research and can affect the scale of the questions we tackle and, as a result, the knowledge we generate. Lastly, the fourth category is “barn blindness”, where problems are apparent to some but so common that many do not see them as concerning or, in some cases, notice that harm that has occurred. I will give examples of these four types of blind spots and how recognizing them has led to insights and change either within the academic or farming communities.
Day 2: Animal faces: Beyond the rational
(followed by lunch with grad students)
Professor Daniel S. Mills
https://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/dmills
Faces are complex and are processed globally; they are of primary importance in emotional communication. This has a range of implications for both scientists and pet owners, ranging from the skill required to read faces effectively, through problems of oversimplifying specific facial signals, to seemingly irrational human responses towards animals and their care. In this presentation I will discuss how we tend to interpret the faces of other species and the implications of this, drawing on my research over the last 10 years on emotion expression in dogs and cats, and the behaviour and welfare problems we encounter as a result.
Conference Schedule
Please see below for the schedule for the conference.
Our Sponsors
A big thank you to our sponsors, who have helped make this conference possible:
