Speaker
Description
Motivation and Research Questions
Intensive meat production drives substantial public health impacts, making One Health (the intersection of human, animal, and environmental health) a pertinent paradigm for interventions. Correspondingly, sustainable food transitions focus on changing husbandry practices of animals in the food value chain in concert with dietary changes on the consumer side. Agricultural workers intuitively learn to understand flock behavior, particularly sounds, as part of biosecurity best practices. This research design is intended to assess whether integrating poultry vocalizations into biosecurity educational materials imparts changes to worker behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge, compared with a traditional training course. It is hypothesized that audio-based training to distinguish between healthy and stressed states of poultry vocalizations may improve worker reasoning associations between poultry’s welfare, their environments, and animal health interventions. It may also provide clues on overall attitudinal shifts to meat consumption and industrial livestock’s impact on the environment that can be applied to consumer interventions.
Study Design and Expected Results
The study will take the form of a randomized control trial of poultry agricultural workers. The online 30-minute biosecurity educational program will take two forms: one with an animal sound training component and the other with a written description of animal monitoring. Participants from each participant pool will be randomly selected into one of the two interventions or a control group. If in an intervention group, participants will be directed to take the online biosecurity course, with or without an audio training. Those in the control group will instead take a 30 minute course on occupational safety before receiving the survey. After completing the course, they will receive an assessment to ascertain overall biosecurity knowledge. They will also receive a set of questions on their dietary patterns, attitudes on the food system’s contribution to environmental impacts, and personal health status (i.e. body mass index, self-assessment on physical/mental health).
Data collection will use Unipark to administer and collect survey responses. Participants will be recruited through flyers at farm supply stores, outreach through government agricultural service offices, veterinary networks, and word-of-mouth. For poultry sounds, we will use existing audio files used in machine learning papers. We intend to analyze our treatment and follow-up results using an Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA), due to multiple dependent variables. The results will be used for additional examination of the usage of poultry vocalizations, particularly consumer interventions.
| Keywords | One Health, Poultry, Biosecurity, Anthropocene, Diets |
|---|---|
| Status of your work | Experimental Design |
| Early Career Researcher Award | Yes, the paper is eligible |
