Local Community Involvement Key to Ensuring Local Community Support for Animal Welfare Initiatives

Oct 14, 2024

The Canadian Research Chair in Community-Oriented Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Disease with the University of Toronto suggests community involvement in the development of strategies to improve animal health and welfare is key to ensuring widespread support for those strategies.

The theme of Animal Health Canada's Forum 2024, which wrapped up yesterday, was Coordination, Collaboration, Communication.Dr. Jude Kong, the Canadian Research Chair in Community-Oriented Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Disease with the University of Toronto, suggests it's important for local communities to be involved in the process.

Quote-Dr. Jude Kong-University of Toronto:

A lot of the communities tend to be neglected and, when you look at the theme today which is collaboration coordination, that speaks to how do you bring the communities, the farmers together to work with researchers, with organizations like this, with the government.If we work this way, where we are coordinating, where we are collaborating so we are making a case for community oriented proactive solutions.

Proactive means scientific solutions that are able to be set in real time and forecast in real time and by so doing they can alert policy makers to say something is wrong in this community.But, this will only happen and get the buy in from these communities, if these solutions are cocreated with these communities.

If they don't have the buy in, they don't know what is in each it will just be a solution but, while they cocreate it, they become part of it.The way we have been solving it is we go to communities and we tell them, this is your problem and this is the solution.The communities don't get buy in. So, with Animal Health Canada, we are working this year under the theme, coordination, collaboration and communication.

Dr. Kong suggests its important to coordinate with farmers and to listen to farmers in order to come up with strategies that will work for farmers.
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