Master's position on environmental enrichment for goats
Ridgetown Campus, University of Guelph, Canada
Goats have evolved in challenging natural environments, and thus developed complex foraging, navigating, cognitive and social skills; improving and enriching commercial goat housing promotes the expression of natural behaviours associated with these skills, and ultimately, increases positive welfare. However, the scientific literature examining goat housing improvements is minimal and often poorly designed, and thus lacks on-farm application transferability. Given the inclusion of natural behaviour and enrichment in Canada’s National Farm Animals Care Committee’s Code of Practice for the Handling and Care of Goats, there is an urgent need to systematically review enrichment options, and surveying goat producers to understand existing enrichment options and their efficacy. The successful candidate for this project will focus on assessing the feasibility of enrichment options across multiple goat farms in Ontario (including milk, meat and fibre goats). From the on-farm work, guidelines and workshops will be produced to assist Ontario producers in meeting the requirements of the Goat Code of Practice.
This position will be supervised by Dr. Tracy Burnett and Dr. Charlotte Winder (University of Guelph) in collaboration with their New Zealand-based colleague, Dr. Gosia Zobel. The candidate will be expected to fulfill course requirements on the main University of Guelph Campus, and is not expected to reside in Ridgetown, ON.
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