Ep50 Marek Špinka on animal welfare, agency, and play behaviour

Dr Marek Špinka is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Animal Science in Prague and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Charles University in Prague. Marek Špinka shares how he began his career studying animals. He wasn’t like many others who knew that they wanted to study animals at a young age. During his university years, he was inspired by his biology professor who always had thought-provoking questions for the class.

Marek then discusses how his original interests in ethics, philosophy, and human psychology still intersect with comparative psychology and animal ethics, which he teaches at university. He mentions that it is enriching to stop considering animals and humans as separate because we are all animals, just different. During his ethics course, he encourages students to think about their ethical judgements and to consider the other sides of arguments before making these judgements.

Marek moves on to discuss his experiences working for the Welfare Quality Network project with farm animals. He believes this project was a successful attempt to develop protocols to use to assess welfare levels in different farms across the EU. This is an important area of research because all farms are different, and this tool could assist in standardizing a quality level across all farms. The AWARE project was also an EU wide project that aimed at spreading the skills and experience that was developed to relatively new members of the project. With an increase in awareness, stakeholders are propelled to consider all sides, better the lives of animals, and have better dialogue with scientists.

Honing in on his specific research topics, Dr Marek Špinka goes into discussing emotions in pigs and how vocalizations can be linked to how pigs communicate their emotions. He also defines affective states vs moods and social dynamics. He then goes on to discuss animal agency which is a tool to do things for ourselves and to do better while going through life.

Towards the end of the podcast, Marek goes into his favourite research topic: animal play. He had the opportunity to study animal play during two trips which were funded through a Fulbright Scholarship in the USA. He is fascinated by not knowing what play is really for in the animal kingdom. He goes on to discuss reasons for why play behaviour developed in other animals and how it can help in perceiving the world during development.

Marek rounds out the podcast by sharing a personal story of when he was 11-years-old, residing in Czechoslovakia in 1968. He and his family fled to Italy and were unsure about being able to go back home. While he was stuck in a train station with other children, he remembers playing with an escalator. It was not a fun time, however, he always remembers how fun it was to play, bringing it back to how play can build resilience.

“Play is in fact very resilient and important... and each single inch of space that we give to play, for the animals, helps a lot not only at this moment, but I think for their whole life.”

You can read more about Dr Marek Špinka’s work HERE

You can find more information about the Welfare Quality Network project HERE

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