Thank you very much for inviting me. To be honest, I've really enjoyed all the talks so far. So very interesting topic to ponder that we don't often enough get involved in. So actually it's a bit of a shame to stop listening, to start talking. In my [INAUDIBLE], yes, I'm a vet. Yes, I'm involved in wild animal health lecturing. But in the past, I've worked as a farm animal vet. And what you won't see is any experience or qualifications studied in wild care science. So what am I going to talk to you about? Well, that's something that I had to start thinking about. What is my role here? What can I talk about? So I did what I'd normally do when I'm preparing a talk. I asked some colleagues to the pub. Left it till quite late. Had a few discussions and ran around a little bit. And things that came up-- well, why don't you talk about donkeys? Why don't you talk about elephants in Thailand was one suggestion. Why don't you talk about zoos in various places? And am I qualified to talk about these things? And then I found this report and started reading, on the suggestion Thai elephants would be a good thing to talk about. What role do vets take in looking at the welfare of elephants in Thailand, for example. This is good. I felt positive. I know a lot about this now. Then I looked a little bit further along and I thought, who’s one of the authors of this report, the author of this report, oh dear. So I think you'll understand-- I hope you'll understand-- why I was both very disappointed to see that you are here, but also relieved. And I thought, I'm in good company. So then what did I do? I took it another step forward and I thought-- I was in the middle of marking a lot of students' exam scripts at the time. And what I seemed to be writing over and over again was, answer the question. So I looked at my title and I thought, well, a veterinary perspective on animal welfare tourism. That's OK. I can do that. I'm onto a winner. This is giving my thoughts and giving a veterinary professional's thoughts on animal welfare and tourism. I'm OK here. I studied with the vets for eight years, worked with them for at least five years, I've taught them for over a year now. This is good. This is good ground. So what I'm going to talk to you about is very much from a practical point of view, from an applied point of view. What do vets think? I can't promise to represent all that. But my own thoughts, people I've worked with, impressions that I've got. Why do I think this is important? Well, in many cases, I think you'll find that the public will often believe that the custodians of animal welfare are vets, rightly or wrongly. And certainly in many places that we're going to talk about, you'll find that it actually is the vets that you're going to have to work with that might have an influence on changing standards of animal welfare, again, rightly or wrongly. So if we are a forum of people that are interested in improving animal welfare and tourism, you're going to have to work with vets, unfortunately. And many of them-- most of them-- are going to be like me, that have no formal training in animal welfare. So I want you to understand this. I want you to know what we're thinking, where we've come from, OK? So this is where I'm coming from. I had a very glib comment in my abstract that actually a lot of vets don't know what that position is in this context. So working as a lecturer in wild animal health, I've had a lot of chance to listen to questions and start to formulate opinions, start to think a lot more deeply about these things. Not most of the time, I'll be honest. But lots of questions, lots of times would expand my own thoughts. And I was very interested in one of your comments, Claire, about volunteer tourism. I get this question so many times from students who say, actually, can we volunteer on this project? It's going to cost us 5,000 pounds. But will that make me a wildlife vet? Well, it might do. But where are we going to go with that? Now, one of my roles is to run a zoo tracking rotation. So finally, our vet students will go through various clinical rotations, and they'll spend a couple of weeks, or they have the option of spending a couple of weeks, working at London Zoo for the rotation that we set up there. This is an email that I sent out to our third year, who are currently making their tracking choices. I don't know the details. It's obviously not important, but the point is this section, where we really have to highlight what zoo vets do. They have a balance. They can't do clinical work all the time. It would be a very bad zoo if they had so much clinical work that they could keep a vet occupied full time. So these guys are involved in welfare. They're involved in research. They're involved in, yeah, clinical work, but day-to-day management. So we emphasize that to these students that applied. And out of 250, 280 students in a year, a quarter of them applied to this tracking rotation. They were very keen to do work with zoo animals. So out of that 65 applications that we went through, one mentioned welfare. And despite, I thought that we'd made quite a good plug, that they should be mentioning welfare if they wanted to be accepted in this tracking rotation, one very heavily mentioned welfare. Nobody else did. I'm sorry, nobody said they wanted to work in tourism. So if we're looking at vets in the tourist industry and the roles they could have, we have to accept that they come there for a certain group. Very often, vets haven't ended up working in zoos in these situations because that's what their aspiration always was. They might well be there for another reason. So they want to do clinical work with that species. Is welfare that big a concern for them? Well, I don't think, in the first instance, that it is. But the caveat to this is, suddenly, I think when vets qualify suddenly, they're welfare experts. I don't know if my colleagues that work in welfare in the faculty would agree with me. But I've worked enough with a lot of farm vets, who think they know a lot about animal welfare. They didn't care until they qualified in many cases, so then they end up [INAUDIBLE] I don't know if you agree or not. They tell me that sometimes. If we're going to communicate and work with these guys, remember that the welfare might not be their primary objective. But also, the vets think that they are the experts very often. Most of us will work in clinical practice, where we expect people to listen to us, and we're used to being listened to. And then we work in a zoo environment, a tourist environment, in research. Suddenly, you're faced with, well hang on, people have got different opinions, and people don't think I'm the most important person in the park. So bear that in mind if you're going to work with us. Now, my background, prior to coming to wildlife, I was working as a farm animal vet. And very often, there's expectation, a hope that the vets will lead on the welfare of farm animals. I'm going to draw a parallel between that and the tourism stuff that we're talking about now. Will vets be able to lead this? Well, yes, they are. But we also need to bear in mind a little bit of conflict. Now, forget welfare for a second. I want you to imagine a disease. And this disease, we test for it with a subjective test. And we ask the vets to go out onto a farm and perform that test. Those farmers are their clients. Their clients want to pass the test. They don't want to find the disease. There is a pressure not to find that disease because we want that person to stay as a client of our practice. A vet's work is primarily a private practitioner's. This disease really is tuberculosis. If you look at the diagnostic test for TB, it can be very easily interpreted on the borderlines as positive or negative, and a lot of vets will find pressure from their clients to conform. And this works with welfare, as well. You do not want to start going lecturing your clients on how bad their welfare is. The same parallel you're going to see in zoos around the world. If you expect the vet to go head to head with the zoo, with their managers, you're going to ask for some conflicts. Now, if you've got some very skillful individuals who can start to weave a path to improving welfare whilst also meeting the obligations of their employers, all well and good. But don't expect that people are going to be able to turn things around instantly. They have got competing interests. And this is something that we have looked at. Don't read this. It's very long. This is back in 2003. It's talking about the vet's role in farms. But this is just one little sentence that I've highlighted. "The profession has tended to keep some distance from the animal welfare movement, providing some advice and clinical expertise but less solidarity and leadership." Not much here about the greyed out section, I'm not worried about that so much. But I think that's true. That's true. In individual cases, we're quite happy to give advice, to help out. To actually turn against an industry, not so much. And I think, if we're looking to improve, welfare in tourism, again, bear in mind where that vet's limitations are. Remember their expertise, as well. But there is going to be some reluctance to move on. Now, the Health and Safety Executive. There's a change in speed. Instant thoughts when I talk about Health and Safety. Any ideas? Positive? Negative? Some grins? I'm going to take it, then we're going to go with a general stereotype that people don't like Health and Safety. And yet, we can all see a point to it, can't we, once it's kept in check. The bad news for a lot of folks in here is that the same reaction that most of us have to health and safety is the reaction that a lot of farmers have to welfare, and as a consequence, a lot of vets. No doubt, the [INAUDIBLE] zoos around the world, to safari parks, to experiences that involve animals. Who are these people that are coming in and throwing welfare regulations on top of us? They're just getting in the way. They're causing problems. They're unnecessary. We need to steer the message in a way that isn't confrontational, that doesn't give us the same reaction that many of us can have to Health and Safety. So what messages do we take from that? Well, vets are seen as leaders. The public can see vets as leaders in animal welfare. Many practitioners will see things slightly differently. We're there to improve health. Welfare? Oh, yeah, health is part of welfare. It comes along with it. We've got the opportunity to improve welfare. Is that what we're doing? Remember, also, that if you expect any vet working for an organization to make radical changes to their organization, you may actually be putting them in conflict with their employer. In some circumstances, you might be able to do that. In others, that's going to cause you limitations. Now, another example. This is myself with slightly more hair when I was doing research in the desert. It was generally accepted that you could [? keep your legs ?] [? up ?] very slightly. So this is some work that I was doing with meerkats a few years ago. And this gave me an opportunity to be in a very different setting. Up until 2013, I had surrounded myself professionally with vets. It was vets that I worked with all the time. When I was doing this work for my PhD, for the first time, I was the only vet. I was surrounded by biologists, psychologists, geographers, conservation scientists. Suddenly, that gives you a very different perspective on things, especially when you come from a very rigid background in terms of training. And we definitely think about things in different ways. Vets are trained to think about individual animals in the first instance. And we think about the welfare of individual animals to a degree. A biologist tends to think about populations. Now, most would argue that they care about animals, that they highly value animals, but they do it in different ways. And some of the conversations that I had working with people from different backgrounds really hit home for the first time. Actually, the accepted measurements, I guess, of welfare that I had in my head didn't fit with the way other people were thinking, and that if you guys are communicating with me as a vet, or if I'm trying to communicate with people from other backgrounds, we need to have to bear in mind what other people consider welfare and what other people's background is, and their subjects. So vets would definitely see themselves, I think, as applied scientists, which is what I put there. We're not pure scientists. We have-- though I don't like to admit it too often-- some limitations in our scientific training. But we also expect to be able to put things into practice. We like to be able to do things. I don't want to speak for all vets, but. And then let's look at a couple of-- these would be the main two journals that I would go to in terms of wildlife and wildlife research, Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine, and the Journal of Wildlife Disease. Now, last night-- I told you I wasn't massively organized-- last night, I went through the last couple of years of publications in these journals. And yes, welfare comes up, but not super regularly. Welfare is often referred to as the justification for carrying out a disease survey that somebody was interested in. But will it improve the health and welfare of animals, realistically? Examples like this-- the example here, "swim with the turtles" tourist attractions, that's quite a rarity. So if we're trying to get messages across to vets and hope that the vets are going to get our messages across for us, we need to think about where vets are getting their information from and how we communicate with them. Remember, it's important to communicate with these guys because they are at the forefront of it. So let's think about two or three examples. If we look at things to do in London or [INAUDIBLE] UK, Zoological Society of London is up there. Definitely one of the tourist attractions in London. And they've got their own veterinary team. To put that into context, very few zoos in the UK can run their own veterinary team. They're just not big enough. They don't have the financial support. And so we've already touched on what these guys do, well they do a lot of welfare. They'll do a lot of research. What's it feel like to be one of those vets in that organization? Maybe they don't even think about themselves as a tourist attraction. They are. Are they fulfilled? [INAUDIBLE] worked [INAUDIBLE]. Yes, they get a nice balance. They get to do lots of different things. They're in a very nice position. Now, this is the Lion Zoo Park in Addis Ababa. Described as a must-see tourist attraction. And for some reason, I decided when I was there six or seven years ago, that I would go and see that zoo. My brother said he'd never seen me quite so upset. Definitely got a bad rep. I think they might be closing it. What is it like to have to work as the zoo vet in that situation? How do you improve welfare when this is seen as a major tourist attraction in this country. These are the lions, that two are left over from the emperor's palace. How do you improve the situation, the welfare for these lions in this facility? You've got a very different position at that point. We also have to bear in mind that the guys working at this place have probably had different training. We just touched a little bit on what different perspectives on welfare are around the world. Are the vets that work with these guys going to be happy with this? Do they want to change things? Again, are they in direct competition with their employers? Which is if they do want to change circumstances. And my last example is talking to a researcher Kim, in that photo at the top. And this is Gorilla Doctors, who work in Africa. We're thinking about ecotourism a little bit now. Vets are definitely involved in ecotourism. Now, we know that ecotourism is incredibly beneficial in terms of resources for the remaining gorilla populations. We also know that it means that, I think something like 30% to 40% of the remaining population of these mountain gorillas are habituated to human [INAUDIBLE] contact [INAUDIBLE]. It's terrifying from a disease point of view. And we know pathogens can transmit from human visitors to these primates, and with potential life-threatening conservation risks. Now, for a vet like Eddie here, how does he feel about tourism? What challenges does tourism bring for him? What benefits does it bring for him? Completely different situation. So I was one vet. But I have listened to a lot of students who want to be vets, who want to work with wildlife, who want to work in conservation and zoos. I've worked with a number of professionals. I've worked in a farming context. I've worked alongside zoo professionals. These are just some ideas about the way that we're thinking and we'd love to get involved more in welfare. I think that's fair to say because obviously, we’re already experts here. We are very interested, but we're not necessarily trained to spot welfare challenges. That said, we've got a very important practical role to play in implementing welfare. We have got to be aware of conflicting interests. Most vets will be privately employed. And there are a wide range of situations that vets are going to become in contact with tourism. So it's probably something that, as a profession, we need to be thinking about more. So realistically, I just want to finish up by saying vets would love be involved, I believe, in tourism more. Don't forget us. Include us in the conversations. But try to understand us.