Animal welfare is now well integrated in people’s minds and aims to make sure that animals are healthy, comfortable, well-fed, safe and able to express natural behaviors without unnecessary pain, fear or distress.

Animal welfare has traditionally focused on preventing suffering, with research emphasising negative experiences. Today, growing scientific interest and public expectations are shifting attention toward positive welfare, ensuring animals can also experience positive states. However, researchers have yet to agree on how to define or measure positive welfare, meaning no current farm animal welfare assessment includes direct animal-based indicators of positive experiences.

The COST Action LIFT will advance this emerging field through multidisciplinary research, cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing, training, and collaboration across Europe, helping lay the foundations for future progress in positive animal welfare research. Industry, government, NGOs, veterinary organisations, and farm advisory bodies are involved throughout the project to ensure practical solutions that strengthen animal welfare and support a more sustainable livestock sector.

LIFT COST Action, Lifting farm animal lives – Laying the foundations for positive animal welfare, launched several initiatives to highlight the power of science dissemination.

On top of the ongoing research outputs such as scientific publications, reports and databases, LIFT network developed several creative initiatives to raise awareness on positive animal welfare. The network came with the idea of creating a children’s book on positive animal welfare, following a workshop held in Poland last March.

Science communication best practice: LIFT

We asked Dr Irene Camerlink, LIFT COST Action Science Communication Coordinator, and Associate Professor at the Institute of Genetics and Animal Biotechnology of the Polish Academy of Science to tell us about this initiative.

Where did the idea for a children’s book on positive animal welfare come from?

The idea of writing a children’s book was already lingering for a few years, mostly initiated by Sébastien Goumon, researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, (ETH Zurich). We wanted to share with the younger generations more about the characters and behaviours of animals, especially pigs. We spoke about it during several research visits, including during a COST Action meeting in Zurich. When we learned that a children’s book fits within the possibility of COST communication tools, we immediately started. Heng-Lun Ko from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) was enthusiastic to join, and Lena Pozdnyakova, PhD student at Freie Universität Berlin, agreed to make the illustrations.

Have you already had any experience with creative writing or illustration?

As a team of four, we each brought in our own expertise. Sébastien brought in the storyline, Heng-Lun had many children’s books on pigs to draw inspiration from, and I had experience with self-publishing a book. We followed Campbell’s Hero’s journey narrative structure to go beyond our usual scientific writing style. Lena is an artist from Kazakhstan, now residing in Berlin, who has worked with COST Actions before. She had illustrated several poems as part of COST Action LIFT as well.

How did you find the process of mixing art, creative writing, and your scientific knowledge?

The writing process took several iterations as we had to adjust our wording to make it more understandable for a broad audience, and especially children. Technical terms that are so common to us may not be understood by people who are not working with animals. We also had to consider that some words in English may not translate well into other languages, as we aim to have the online version of the book available in multiple languages. Adding the artwork really made the story come alive more. Lena put in an immense amount of work and the result illustrates the emotion in the story well. Through children’s books, text and art could be given equal importance.

How can public engagement and science communication projects like this improve knowledge of your field?

Science communication is nowadays so much easier, as social media is a main way to spread information. This does not always need to increase knowledge directly but can at least create a greater awareness of topics. Positive animal welfare is not an easy concept to explain, even to other researchers, but bringing awareness of the importance of giving animals the opportunity to have positive experiences is needed. Science communication has a main role in this. The main publication of LIFT, which presents a definition of positive animal welfare, has already been cited 170 times in less than a year. I believe this is partly attributable to the size of COST Action, but also to the science communication around this publication.

What did you learn from this project?

We were overwhelmed by the number of positive messages from all over the world about this book. Some were from people who received the book at an in-person meeting in London, while other messages came from researchers within or outside of our networks. They emphasized how important they found it to have a way to explain to others, in simple terms, what they do in their research. While the process of writing and designing the book took a lot of time, we learned that such ‘side projects are worth the effort. We have reached many more people with the book than we could have reached through a scientific publication.

Any additional achievement, output or initiative you wish to highlight?LIFT is almost coming to an end and the science communication working group has been amazing. We have an active website team who update the website each month with the latest news and write news articles about the activities and outputs. Here we also show outputs that are typically given less attention in science, such as art, poetry, graphic design and YouTube videos. We encourage other COST Actions to have a look at the website for ideas. The science communication team is relatively small compared to the size of the Action, but the achievements made by the people involved, such as the social media team, deserve proper acknowledgement. Through science communication, researchers can make science come to live in the scientific community and beyond.