Preface: A Note by the Author
The first time I mentioned the words ‘One Welfare’ was on 5 May 2015.
I was participating in a meeting in Foss House, York, UK, on animal welfare
at the time of slaughter, and trying to explain the relevance of multidiscip-
linary work to colleagues present. What appeared to be yet another inter-
vention at a work meeting haunted me for days, as if by vocalizing these two
words I unleashed a magical spell on me, which completely changed the way
in which I would see things around my daily animal welfare role. Multiple
interconnections flashed in my brain when discussing animal welfare topics
and it then became clear to me that, while I and many other experts have
worked on animal welfare for a number of years, we have yet failed to
tackle many ongoing issues. My current thinking is that this is very likely to
be happening because we have mainly dealt with animal welfare as an iso-
lated issue, rather than as an integrated, multidisciplinary topic.
For some time I could not stop thinking about these two words and this
led to discussions with some of my office colleagues, where I explained that I
had a thought that could help us in our role to help improve not just animal
welfare but also human well-being. My colleagues thought the idea sounded
interesting and asked me to put my ideas down on a paper for discussion
with the team. Shortly after this I circulated the first draft paper setting
down the outline for ‘One Welfare – a platform to improve animal welfare
and human well-being’. The paper was very well received by colleagues and
I was then asked to present this to the four UK Chief Veterinary Officers on
9 September 2015. At the meeting I presented my initial thoughts around
One Welfare and the different suite of outcomes that derived from them.
I was probed and challenged, with a very successful outcome. All four
thought the idea was worth taking further, and shortly after I was asked to
arrange a stakeholder meeting and present a proposal for the development
of a One Welfare platform.
I organized the list of attendees, venue and date with the support of the
Animal Welfare team in Defra. Attendees included a range of selected gov-
ernment departments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and veter-
inary organizations. The meeting took place on 26 October 2015. During
xiii