DS research

A small survey of working donkeys in Mexico illustrated a high prevalence of dental disease (62%). However, only 18% of cases were severe enough to have an apparent impact on the a donkey's welfare and required dental treatment. Many donkeys manage well with some degree of dental disease and owner education about agerelated dental disease and the need for supplemental feeding will alleviate some of the welfare implications of dental disease, particularly where resources for dental treatment are limited.

Increased levels of personal wealth in China are fuelling demand for luxury products including ejiao, a product made using donkey skin. A traditional medicine, ejiao’s popularity is largely due to its reported anti-aging properties. Demand for donkey skins to produce ejiao is conservatively estimated at 4 million per year. This represents a significant proportion of the global donkey population of 44 million. China’s own donkey population has nearly halved in the last 20 years and entrepreneurs are now looking worldwide to satisfy a growing demand. Despite their essential role in livelihoods and 30 community resilience donkeys are largely invisible in livestock policies, livelihoods and humanitarian projects. It is therefore unsurprising that the emerging trade in skins is also invisible. Donkeys are frequently stolen from owners across Africa and illegally slaughtered in the bush; only the skins are removed and carcasses left to rot. In other areas, donkeys are bought at less than current market value and are transported in inhumane conditions to recently built legal slaughterhouses. In the short term donkey owners are facing donkey prices that have increased up to tenfold within a few years and they are without the means to replace animals they depend on. The invisibility of the trade is compounded by illegitimate export practices and criminal gangs. Due to the lucrative market for skins intensive farms are present in China and are likely to expand to other countries. Such rearing creates significant welfare concerns for a species poorly adapted to intensive practices. Australia has been exploring harvesting feral donkeys in the Northern Territories, possibly including some considered by indigenous communities to be owned and with cultural significance. This demand risks the welfare of donkeys, the communities who live with them, and, within a few decades, perhaps the species as a whole.

This paper presents an evaluation of the use of contextualised problem-based learning (PBL) in the context of the law and animal welfare. Generally, law is taught through the transmission of information, however in PBL, discussions and analyses are integral rather than conclusory to learning. As a curriculum approach, it is becoming increasingly common to use problem scenarios in facilitating awareness of legal issues and to engage interest by highlighting the real-world ramifications. Furthermore, such an approach allows students to become active in their own learning and promotes the development of decision-making abilities through the identification and analysis of real problems. This may be particularly apposite in developing skills for addressing certain kinds of seemingly intractable policy problems. Such an approach was adopted as part of a teaching session during a ‘One World’ festival event at a UK university. The application of legal precedence to authentic problems such as animal welfare takes place across subject-matter domains and therefore allowed interdisciplinary and translational methodologies to be explored with groups of interdisciplinary graduate students.

A designed characteristic was the facilitation of evaluation and such prescience allowed multiple opportunities for observation, focus group discussion and the deployment of questionnaires. The results were generally positive in relation to student learning with a significant appreciation of the difficulties of making decisions in complex ethical contexts. However, while students reported a meaningful learning experience, the specific, identified, outcomes varied significantly. This may reflect the difficulties around focussed learning outcomes relative to such messy-problems, suggesting that the complexity of the issues promotes an allied complexity of emergent learning. It is suggested that within this deeper, complex appreciation of problems, such as those associated with animal welfare and legislation, is where PBL both fosters and facilitates the development of authoritative and ethical decision-making skills in young people.