“We want to get a real-time picture of how each farm animal is doing”

19/09/2019

Pol Llonch, a 2007 UAB graduate in Veterinary Science, pursued a Master’s in Veterinary Research and another in Agroecology and Sustainable Farming, and then he earned his PhD from the UAB in 2012 after five years as a researcher at the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA). His research interests have particularly focused on wellbeing in farm animals.

What scientific indicators show animal wellbeing? As consumers, are we interested in this information about the products we buy? Is animal wellbeing related to conservation of the planet? Llonch answers all these questions while looking back on his career.

Why did you decide to study Veterinary Science?
The typical answer is that you love animals, and it’s true; you can’t be a veterinarian if you don’t like animals, but I didn’t study Veterinary Science to study small animals. Instead, I have a connection with the rural world, though I’m not quite sure where it came from. At the age of 15 or 16, I spent a few summers working on cow farms, and, you know, I’m from the city of Sabadell, but from a young age I had this interest. I decided to pursue this major to work with farm animals, livestock, such as pigs, cows raised for milk and meat, sheep.

What was your experience as a UAB student like?
I really liked it – I’d do it all over again. The Faculty of Veterinary Science at the UAB has amazing facilities. There’s the Veterinary Clinical Hospital, the experimental farms, and some animals like sheep that always live there, and this allows you more or less everyday contact, although it’s true that other species or more contact would be better, especially for those of us working in farm animals.

You studied in Toulouse with the Erasmus Programme in the last year of your degree.
Yes, at the National Veterinary School of Toulouse. It was really interesting. In France, the system for admission into veterinary science programmes is very select. There are just four schools in the entire country, and it was quite a different atmosphere than here. There they attach more importance to the relationship with farm animals, also because it is a country that largely lives off livestock in small farms scattered around the country. It was a great experience – you meet people from all over. It’s an experience that I would recommend to everyone, experiencing a different education system, oral exams, practical exams… 

When you finished, how did you start your career? What were your first few steps?
I did an internship at a veterinary centre in Tona, and that was my first real contact with farm animal veterinary science. I liked it, but it also helped me figure out what I didn’t want to do, and this pushed me to go back to the university to look for what I knew I wanted: to do things differently and learn every day.
I got in touch with an animal wellbeing research group from IRTA via Xavier Manteca, a professor of Ethology and Animal Wellbeing in the faculty. They were just beginning a project at that time, in 2007. This is how my research career got underway.

What is animal wellbeing?
Animal wellbeing is studying the strategies that help improve animals’ living conditions, from health to nutrition, housing, comfort and the freedom to express their natural behaviour. For example, a pig is designed, so to speak, to dig, which is what it does in nature, so you decide that they have to be able to dig in breeding pigsties because otherwise it could lead to a series of behavioural problems.

Is there a country that is a paragon in laws on animal wellbeing?
The United Kingdom is a pioneer in animal wellbeing and animal rights all over Europe, as are all the Scandinavian countries. Everything is associated with social perception, and northern European citizens are more concerned with animal wellbeing, even though consciousness is increasing everywhere.

Was your thesis on this field of research?
Yes, it was a pretty hard thesis because I was looking for strategies to improve animal wellbeing prior to slaughter, such as stunning the animals, which is when they lose consciousness so that they do not suffer during slaughter. In any case, the animal wellbeing group was very small, and we all participated in the different projects which we were involved in, from improving the housing conditions of gestating sows to strategies to lower cow lameness. My time at IRTA was extremely gratifying.

You finished your doctorate at the UAB and your research fellowship at IRTA in 2012. What did you do after that?
IRTA really encouraged PhDs to leave the country. For personal reasons, my partner and I decided that we wanted to go abroad, and so I searched for a post-doctoral contract. In October I was hired by the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom to work on a project on animal wellbeing indicators in sheep, but I had applied for other fellowships as well, and I was awarded one of them, a Marie Curie fellowship, so I ended up in Edinburgh at Scotland’s Rural College, an institution associated with the University of Edinburgh.

What was your avenue of research there?
I had the chance to do basic science instead of more applied science. I related animal behaviour and wellbeing to greenhouse gas emissions. It was the first time that someone joined those two important fields, which are on the 21st-century social agenda. We were seeking strategies to improve animal wellbeing while helping mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, primarily methane emissions, which are the ones emitted by ruminants. My project tried to find eating behaviour strategies with the goal of not only improving animals’ wellbeing but also lowering their emissions.

And you finally came back to the UAB in 2015.
I came with a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship, and after that I continued with the Tecniospring INDUSTRY d'ACCIÓ fellowship, and now I have a Juan de la Cierva fellowship. We at the university were recently awarded a European project, Clear Farm, which we are starting in October. It continues in the line of evaluating animal wellbeing: how we can determine if animals are well and finding reliable scientific indicators that tell us if they have problems, are stressed or ill. Through sensors which are currently being developed, we analyse animal behaviour, such as how they move around the farm, or how many times they go to eat or drink, and all of this gives us information on their wellbeing. We want to get a real-time picture of how each farm animal is doing, a computerised system that packages all the data from the sensors. This is useful information for livestock farmers who want to know how their animals are doing and whether they can make any changes or improvements, but it’s also useful for consumers, such as with labelling that tells them about the animals’ wellbeing.

What is the challenge of this project?
This is an avenue we want to keep researching. We are interested in improving the methods to learn how animals feel, what’s up with them, in order to put ourselves in their skin and understand them better. Once we are capable of understanding what animals are doing, another question is why they are doing it, that is, why a wild boar is nocturnal, and what happened in the domestication process of pigs that changed this. We want to answer questions about the evolution of their genetic code, which could explain why animals behave in and are a certain way.

AWEC was recently created, a company in which the UAB is a part-owner which emerged from the Animal Nutrition and Wellbeing Service (SNiBA) in the Faculty of Veterinary Science, headquartered in the UAB Research Park.
Yes, from the very start, we saw that all this knowledge had to be applied; we wanted it to have an impact and to really improve animals’ conditions. We have sought ways to make this impact, and we recently created AWEC Advisors S.L., a tech-based company, to better focus the service or knowledge transfer to companies, because this is ultimately where you can have an impact. We have all kinds of clients, from pharmaceutical companies to livestock cooperatives not only locally but also based in other European countries and even further afield. We have a very broad range and essentially what we do is transmit or try to apply the knowledge generated in an ecosystem like the university in daily practice. The course I took at the UAB entitled “U2B: From University to Business” was extremely helpful in this regard because we learned ways to boost the transfer of our research results to the market.

Tell us about an applied project you are working on now.
Right now, we are working on a small farm, a family-owned company in Riudellots de la Selva; they make their own products, they slaughter their pigs and they sell them to butchers. They’re not part of a very large chain of farms, which is quite unusual here in Catalonia. They wanted to improve their animals’ wellbeing not only to boost their added value but also because they felt more comfortable working in this way. We searched for a way to improve the sows’ living conditions. When they give birth, they spend 3 to 4 weeks nursing their piglets. In conventional intensive farming systems, they are caged, and the only thing they can do is stand up and stretch out.  What we’ve done on this farm is we’ve designed a system so that the sows have more room; they can move about freely and interact with their piglets without limitations, have mother-baby interaction without constraints, and ultimately boost their wellbeing. We have been working on this project for two years, and we’re getting great results in terms of wellbeing and productivity, and in terms of reactions from consumers, farmers and society. The media have also taken a keen interest in this practice.

I’m guessing that achieving these improvements in animal wellbeing is not a concern of farms involved in mass production, but might consumer demand push for a change?
Exactly. Ultimately consumers are the ones who say how they want it produced and the farmers or producers adapt, as long as consumers are willing to pay for what they want. Ultimately, animal wellbeing is an ethical quality standard, and if you want a higher standard, this may raise the price. For example, one way to improve animal wellbeing is by lowering density, so if you have a barn of a certain size where you house 50 pigs under conventional conditions, in order to increase animal wellbeing you may have to lower the number of animals, and consequently the price of pork may rise. If consumers really want an increase in animal wellbeing, they have to be willing to pay for it.