August 8-11th, 2011, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Call for Papers
WAFL 2011 will feature a combination of submitted research presentations and invited talks. Research papers must address topics specifically related to the use of scientifically robust methods to assess animal welfare at the group level in practical or commercial settings such as farms, slaughter plants, during transport, at animal markets, and in laboratories, animal shelters and zoos.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Development and validation of animal welfare assessment or audit protocols
- Development and validation of innovative/automated measures of animal welfare
- Practical implementation of welfare assessment or audit protocols
- Combinations of animal welfare indicators for comprehensive and efficient welfare assessment
- Integrating animal welfare assessment with assessment of environmental impact or food safety
- Assessing and improving compliance with animal welfare standards or guidelines
- Welfare assessment in zoos and laboratories
Instructions to authors:
• Authors should indicate whether they prefer a spoken or poster presentation. Please note that the number of spoken presentations will be limited. Presenting authors may not give more than one spoken paper.
• Abstract submission opens 1 January 2011, and the deadline for abstract submission is 1 March 2011. Abstracts will be reviewed and authors will be notified of the final status of their abstract by 30 April 2011. For abstracts to be included in the Conference Proceedings, the presenting author must be registered as participant of the congress before 20 May 2011.
• Presentations should be of original research, which is substantially completed, but which has not yet been published as a full paper in a scientific journal.
• Abstracts must contain a clear statement of the purpose of the work, the methods used, the results, and conclusions. Results must be presented in sufficient detail to support the conclusions drawn. Except for theoretical contributions, papers describing the development and validation of methods of an animal welfare assessment protocol or audit, and review papers, submitted abstracts must describe the study design and sample size, give precise information on the results so far obtained, indicate the method(s) of analysis, and provide information about test statistics. Authors are strongly encouraged to include numerical values for results (e.g. means and measures of variability, correlation coefficients) where appropriate. Reviewers will be advised to reject empirical abstracts that do not contain a clear statement of the actual results obtained, or which rely on the expectation of future results, since it is very difficult to evaluate the suitability of these abstracts for presentation.
• Abstracts must not exceed 3000 characters including title, authors and addresses, and including spaces and punctuation.
• Abstracts must be written and presented in English. Linguistic accuracy is the responsibility of the authors.
• Figures, tables, references and acknowledgments must not be included in the abstract
**For registration and abstract submission information, please visit the WAFL website: www.uoguelph.ca/ccsaw/wafl
**Based on the quality of their abstracts, a limited number of presenters may be invited to submit a full manuscript of their work for publication in a special issue of Animal Welfare.