Presenting a workshop at the 58th ISAE international congress in Utrecht

By Dr Ellen Williams & Dr Holly Vickery

As Professor Mark Rutter said in his previous blog post, there are so many great opportunities to be had at conferences, particularly international congresses such as the recent 58^th International Congress of the ISAE from August 4-8, in Utrecht.

The theme was one which really resonated with us, Towards a good life for all animals.

With the fabulous Dr Jane Goodall in mind and the mindset of ‘What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make’, we really wanted to attend this congress but also do something that we really feel passionately about, which is help people to consider individual animals when considering their care.

The conference was huge, with more than600 delegates. An action-packed programme included:

• Five plenary talks
• 90+ oral presentations
• 300+ posters
• Workshops
• Tours to local facilities

We Dr Ellen Williams (ISAE UK secretary) and Dr Holly Vickery (ISAE regional member) were lucky enough to host a workshop on animal personality, entitled Providing a good life to all animals: the importance of recognising, understanding and managing individual differences.

 Holly (left) and Ellen (right) with the workshop sign

The aim of the workshop was to have discussions around the concept of animal individuality and consider the role of animal personality in animal experiences, particularly when considering how to provide a good life for all animals, the theme of the conference. We were joined by 37 very well-behaved delegates who formed five fabulous and hard-working groups.

The workshop was designed to be interactive, and as we all know, a workshop is not a workshop without some role play, so lots of opportunities for audience participation were embedded into the programme - from discussions to pretending they were animals!

In brief we covered:

• What personality meant to the delegates and how the terminology differs across disciplines
• Measures of personality and how those measures may impact on how personality is portrayed
• Adjectives used to describe aspects of animal personality
• The importance of personality in animal conservation

• The importance of personality in animal management

• How we can use personalities in animal management – using published papers we created a game of Animal Tinder… other animal dating apps are available!

• How different personalities may respond to different situations – first we gave workshop participants a series of scenarios and asked how they thought the animal would respond.

• Then, to make sure no-one had nodded off, we gave the groups a behavioural profile and asked them to ‘behave like they imagine that animal would in the given situation’ and then the others at the table had to guess their personality profile – this tested the groups’ acting skills as well personality interpretation skills. It turns out there is talent in the ISAE community - the big stage is calling for many!

The workshop was lots of fun and we are supremely grateful to everyone who attended for being so engaged! If anyone who came would like a copy of the resources, then please do let us know- we would be more than happy to share them! 

Attending conferences can be financially very difficult so we were very grateful to Harper Adams University, Professor Mark Rutter and the ISAE for providing financial support to us to attend this congress.

It was a great opportunity to hear MANY amazing talks and spend time talking about all things applied animal behaviour research, which is always very exciting!