Are our Animals Happy?

Mairi Stewart is assessing the emotions in animals.

We are all part of a movement that sees us scurrying through the gauntlet of grocery aisles trying to use our time and our money economically as we hunt down grocery bargains. We scan the myriad of food products and their confusing info-smothered labels determined to secure an assortment of provisions for our families. Add to this the duty we have to ensure that the weekly grocery haul is healthy, tasty and high quality. We consider the origins of our chosen morsels and where and how they may have been produced (just before we chuck them into our trolley) because more than ever before we are aware of what we are consuming.

Mairi Stewart, Research Scientist Associate at AgResearch at Ruakura, Hamilton is en route to helping make our grocery shopping experiences easier in the future; she is developing methods to assess animal welfare.
A tidy and tranquil office provides the site for Mairi to share details of her latest work. She has popped back into her office for an hour or two after spending part of her week on the farm, “hanging with cows and farmers.” She laughs as she tells stories of the latest pranks her colleagues have played on her after returning from a conference overseas discussing her PhD thesis, and again after recently winning a Kudos award. Mairi is relaxing to be around; the conversation flows, yet it is crisp and direct.

“A whole love of animals thing” saw city-raised, self-confessed horse-freak Mairi train as a hairdresser after leaving high school as “I had a lack of interest in school at the time”. She enjoyed the artistic profession and entered competitions, travelled and ran her own business and appreciated being able to get out to ride her horses.

Hitting 23 years of age, Mairi felt she had missed out on something by not going to university so she started doing extra-mural science papers. A couple of years later, Mairi followed her dream and threw in her hairdressing scissors to study fulltime for a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Biology, specifically in animal welfare and behaviour at The University of Waikato. Three years later Mairi was travelling abroad to America, Australia and France monitoring and researching the stress of air transport on horses for her Master’s thesis.

Four years later, working as a Research Associate at AgResearch, Mairi grew hungry for more responsibility and craved the task of driving her own research project. “I knew I had to do my Ph D,” says Mairi.
Simultaneously, a project emerged that was right up Mairi’s alley - animal compassion. It was approved fit for PhD level research and it combined well with her job, and so Mairi embarked on work to measure the stress in animals.

“Animal welfare is increasingly an important topic,” says Mairi. “There are implications for our dairy and meat industries and we must be able to maintain our overseas markets.”

Just as we see some of our produce labelled ‘organic’, ‘New Zealand made’ or ‘free-range’, Mairi talks of supermarket chains in Europe and the US that have labelling systems on their meat and dairy products which grade the product dependent on the standard of welfare of the farming system that produced it. The higher the grade on the label, the higher the standard of welfare the product originates from.

Although this hasn’t happened in New Zealand just yet, Mairi sees this ‘welfare-friendly labelling’ happening eventually and so her work sees her crusading to protect our markets ahead of the labelling demands from countries that import our meat and dairy. And her work is valued by our meat and dairy industries, because they see what’s happening in overseas markets and they recognise the need to fortify our market locally also.

Looking into objective measures of stress in animals, Mairi has led a project focused on developing subtle yet accurate stress-measuring tools, because ironically some current stress-measuring methods create stress in the animal during the testing process.

Through novel uses of infrared thermography (IRT) that are a world first, Mairi uses a special camera to measure sensitively the heat coming off a cow’s eye. The infrared camera gauges the tiny shifts in the eye temperature caused by changes in blood flow occurring during stress. Blood flow varies during different procedures because of the different levels of stress that are triggered in the cow. The cow’s blood flow is not the same when it is being de-horned compared with when it is being vaccinated for example, and so the heat radiating from the cow’s eyeball evidently provides a different infrared reading.

Armed with the knowledge that this technology provides, Mairi and her team are building an assessment system that takes into account different environmental needs for animals, like shade and shelter, specific to New Zealand. “We must have our own assessment system that suits our farming production systems. We can’t use one that’s been developed in Europe or America, where fat cows are kept in an indoor barn where they have never seen a blade of grass before, and then use that system to evaluate our own livestock,” clarifies Mairi.

On-farm consulting and assessments will be required and most farmers are open to it, says Mairi. “We know the pressures that farmers are already under, and they are also keen to hear recommendations (based on the research and assessments) that they can implement, especially when the introduced standards can increase productivity and earn them more money in their back pocket. Most farmers want the best for their animals, and they should be rewarded for good practices.” And eventually if and when a labelling system is introduced, farmers will be able to assure the welfare of their production practices to consumers overseas and locally; a higher value can be demanded for produce with a higher grading.

And there are further benefits hovering around this cash cow. Mairi’s assessment system could be aligned with our clean, green image to articulate high levels of both animal welfare and environmental responsibility in our country, further strengthening the price we can demand in our export markets. “New Zealand has so many opportunities for niche markets, especially when you look at production systems overseas where animals are housed completely inside. We can use our clean, green image to tell consumers our animals are outside in a green paddock and they have a good quality of life,” says Mairi.

Where to from here for Mairi’s research tool? “This technology has the potential to assess positive emotions in animals, because people might want to know if the animals happy? Are they in pain? And we will be above the rest of the world with this work,” Mairi suggests.

Mairi believes that her research tool could be commercialised as a product to be sold, but her focus is on the research behind its use and the goal of moving towards on-farm welfare improvements. And she’s pretty good at the research aspect, winning a number of awards. Most recently she won the 2008 Emerging Scientist Kudos Award for her IRT research on beef and dairy cattle. She is modest about this achievement, especially as she saw the other finalists as being “pretty high level competition”. She wasn’t able to personally accept her Kudos at the awards’ presentation because she was at a conference on animal welfare in Belgium; the year before it was Mexico. “Another perk of doing research about something you are passionate about: overseas travel,” enthuses Mairi.

For Mairi, science research really is a lifestyle choice. She gets to meet a lot of different people and she puts the people-skills she learnt as a hairdresser to good use when she speaks to farmers about her work. She receives a quiet respect from her audience unconsciously and this makes sense when you learn that she has tutored and supervised science students, and she enjoys talking about her work to high school students and community groups. You salute the sense of relief in Mairi’s voice as she shares that science research is her calling, that she is proud that she didn’t give up on her true passion of working with animals and that she has no regrets. What a life!

So in the future, when you are saving time and brain-power deciding between two welfare-friendly grades of meat at your local supermarket freezer, and being a socially responsible shopper, you now know who you should be praising - Mairi Stewart.

We spend too much time at work so:
Wake up in the morning and look forward to going to work! If you don’t …
• Find out what inspires you.
• Find your passion and follow it/make it happen/go for it.
• With enough determination you can do anything you choose and be anyone you want to be.
• Surround yourself with inspirational people.
• Do the hard yards and at all costs definitely don’t give up!

To view a short video summarising Mairi’s work visit www.thekudos.org.nz/winners.html
By Susan J. Luff

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