Cathy Dwyer

Director JMICAWE and Professor in Animal Behaviour and Welfare

What is your current role at Easter Bush campus and what does a typical day look like?

I have two roles at the Easter Bush Campus – for two days a week I work as the Director of the Jeanne Marchig International Centre for Animal Welfare Education (JMICAWE) at the R(D)SVS, and for the remaining three days per week I am the Head of the Animal Behaviour and Welfare research group at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). For my JMICAWE job, the Centre works to promote animal welfare education, for veterinarians/vet students in particular, in UK and abroad, with a focus on Asia. For my SRUC role I lead a team of 15 researchers who conduct research projects to improve animal welfare, particularly farm animal welfare. So I don’t really have a typical day, as it will depend which of my roles I am undertaking at the time but here are some examples of what I might do in a typical few weeks. At the moment I am in India, running a workshop on animal behaviour and welfare research and teaching for about 40 veterinary staff and students from 9 Indian veterinary schools at Bangalore Veterinary College. We have also been visiting the Bhannergatta Biological Reserve to meet vets working at the Wildlife SOS Bear Rehabilitation Centre where ex-dancing bears have been re-introduced to living in the forest.reserve. I will spend next week with colleagues from Global Academy for Agriculture and Food Security (University of Edinburgh) in Punjab, Delhi and Mumbai to help develop new contacts and connections for student exchanges. Last week I was attending a meeting with Defra and the UK Animal Welfare Commission in London to discuss activities to provide independent advice on animal welfare to the UK and Scottish Governments in my other role as Chair of Scotland’s Animal Welfare Commission. When I’m in the office I might be meeting with my PhD and MSc students to discuss their animal welfare research work (8 projects on horses and sheep welfare on the go at the moment), reviewing data and writing papers, writing grants for new research funding, looking at our education provision at undergraduate and MSc level and how that might be improved, preparing for other overseas visits or anything else that might have popped up in my inbox.    

How did you get to where you are today? (obligatory question)

I did a PhD in prenatal development at the Royal Veterinary College in London, and then was successful in winning a five-year post doctoral position at SRUC (SAC as it was then) to research maternal behaviour and lamb survival, even though I had not worked in animal behaviour since my undergraduate courses. This was a good lesson that your PhD is full of transferable skills, and you can sell your skill set to a future employer, even if it does not exactly match the project on offer. I was also incredibly lucky, firstly that my supervisor and mentor for this project recognised that I could offer something new to the research group, and secondly that there was a 5 year project available, almost unheard of in contract research where 2-3 year projects are the norm! During this project I learnt a lot about animal behaviour, lambing sheep and making research projects work when you are sleep-deprived in the middle of the night with an intense data collection schedule in the one period of the year (lambing) when you can conduct your research. During this project we made some important discoveries that have helped change the way that we should be managing pregnant and lambing ewes, and I was lucky enough to be offered follow on funding at the end of the project. I have continued to retain an absolute fascination with the interactions between mothers and their offspring, and how important these are for offspring development, ever since, although I now also conduct research on other welfare issues, such as welfare assessment, impact and alternatives to painful management procedures, and human-animal interactions. In 2007 I was appointed as a Reader, and in 2011 I became a Professor of Animal Behaviour and Welfare when I took over as head of the research group, Then in 2016, when the first Director of JMICAWE decided to move back to New Zealand, I agreed to take on the Directorship alongside my other role.

How did you land your current role? (obligatory question)

Research is an interesting career in many ways as often the keys to success are in your own hands – winning grants, writing papers, building your own reputation in your chosen field of science. This is both positive and negative, as sometimes grant winning seems pretty random (see below) and this can be a recipe for a poor work-life balance as success seems to reward those who work all hours of the day and night. I have definitely been guilty of that in the past but having two children now has meant that I try to have a more balanced perspective, and owning a dog and a horse means I need to leave the office for some practical animal welfare activities regularly. Despite what you hear in the media academia can be a good career to allow children and full time work, and the hours can be flexible.  I honestly don’t think being a mother has really had an impact on my career, I work more efficiently than I used to when I know I need to leave at a specific time to collect kids from school.

When I became head of the Animal Behaviour and Welfare research group at SRUC this was mostly because the former head was moving up to another role, and the position became available. Before then I had already helped out with other aspects of the role, so being willing to take on new responsibilities, and supporting other staff, can be useful to learn new skills. When the JMICAWE Director was planning to move back to New Zealand, we discussed the benefits of combining the roles, and to bring the different areas of animal welfare expertise closer together, so it was a natural move to also take on the Directorship role. I firmly believe that the Easter Bush campus is one of the most important locations in the world for animal welfare research and education, and by working together we can really make a difference to animal lives.

Was there a time you messed up and felt like you’d failed? How did you bounce back?

To be honest working in research, where you are constantly applying for grant funding to support your research, is a constant series of failures and bouncing back. Only about 20% or less of research grants that we write are funded, so failing to secure funding for a particular project is a common occurrence. It can be rather soul-destroying, when the project that you have nurtured, worked on and nursed through to submission is not supported, sometimes even when the referees also agree that it is a great idea. But just often enough to keep us motivated we do win grants, not always the ones that we thought were the best, but always something interesting and relevant to animal welfare. For example, we learnt last week that an EU-funded project that had been on the reserve list for nearly 6 months was suddenly going to be funded – great news and completely unexpected! Winning grants usually occurs just about frequently enough to be able to cope with the disappointment when research ideas don’t secure funding, and encourage us to get back on with the next good idea for funding.

How did you learn to embrace risk-taking?

Each new role comes with a new set of skills and challenges, and usually the day after you take up the role you are treated as if you have been doing it for years. You are asked to make decisions on the basis of a very imperfect grasp of the situation and history of an issue. So there is a fair amount of flying by the seat of your pants and hoping that you don’t say or do anything that will be too damaging whilst you are learning the skills and background to your new role. But this also brings lots of rewards – it can be too easy, and a bit too boring, to stick to what we know how to do well, and learning to master a new skill can be exhilarating. I do miss having the opportunity to do as much research myself, which I love, but working with others to develop their research careers, and having a better understanding of the broader welfare issues on which we are working has been a good compensation. 

Tell us about a recent business career setback. How did you recover?

Recently we were not successful in securing an endowment that would have secured the future working of the JMICAWE for many years to come. The noises from the funder had been very positive and so we had already started to think about how this would work, so to learn that this was not going to happen was a bit of a shock. However, this has provided the opportunity to have a complete re-think about how we do our business, and to start to think more creatively about what we do and whether we could do it better. So, although the funding would have been very nice indeed, we have used this as a lever to look at doing things differently and maybe taking things in new directions.

Think back to five years ago. Did you envision your career as it is today?

Five years ago I was a bit newer into the head of Animal Behaviour and Welfare research role than I am today. I like to think I probably do the job a bit better now than then, although some of that has been about accepting that I can’t do the same amount of research as I did at the start. I had not considered that I would also be running the Marchig Centre, and that has brought with it a lot of new opportunities to expand from farm animals into the welfare of other species, a lot of overseas travel and exposure to different cultural approaches and welfare issues. Overall I think this has made my dual roles rather more high profile, so now I do a lot more consultancy and provide independent advice to a number of different organisations, NGOs and to EU government (through the Animal Welfare Platform) and Scottish Government (through the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission which I chair).

Was there ever a role you applied for and landed, but weren't 100% qualified to do? How did you proceed?

See most of my answers above – I have never been 100% qualified for any new role, but have had enough qualifications, experience or skills to meet about 80% of what was needed, and I have learnt the rest on the job, through trial and error, some fantastic mentors who supported me in the roles, and through asking for help when it was needed. And a little bit of bluff and luck every now and again. I think if you are committed to the project or role (for me this has always been caring passionately about animal behaviour and animal welfare) then you can always muddle through until you pick up the other skills, and your enthusiasm for the work will get you through. The one job that I did land and decided not to take (a job in science journalism early in my career when I was questioning whether short term contract research was the right path, and a permanent job might have been nice) I was also not really qualified for, but my heart wasn’t truly in it either, and I think that would have been the biggest issue, not my lack of qualification.  

Which leadership career skills were the most difficult to develop?

Budgeting and the financial side of project or team management is still the aspect of the job that I like least. Chasing the pennies up and down the columns of a spreadsheet can be pretty mind-numbing and I can always think of a myriad of more interesting tasks to be doing. But it does matter that we have enough money to do the things that we want to do, and that we properly cost our research so that we are able to carry out our studies rigorously, so I’ve had to learn to embrace the spreadsheets and accounts, even though I would still rather someone else was doing it.

How did you develop the skill of speaking so engagingly in front of groups students when teaching?

Like many students when I first started out in research the part of the job that I really disliked was having to talk in public – it is a critical skill for academics, and really important if you want to influence others and communicate about your work. So I did have to work on how to present and practice different ways to deliver the content of a talk. Now I really enjoy giving talks and presentations at conferences, and it is exhilarating to be able to tell the story of your own research, especially when it is an area that you love and care passionately about. Teaching others about animal behaviour and animal welfare is always rewarding, and I love to be able to tell the stories of the amazing things animals can do and why we should value them. There is nothing better than when someone comes up to you afterwards and tells you that it has changed the way they look at things, or where you have been able to show someone how amazing biology can be (my favourite moment is still in talking to school children where one girl whispered ‘wow, that’s so cool’ when I described how maternal behaviour is expressed – exactly my response to biology at that age!). But a tip for students – most of us take our energy and enthusiasm from the audience, if you looked bored and half asleep we will also start to feel less energetic and interested too. So being interested and engaged with your lecturers will help to make it a good experience for all of us!