Column: Animal love
By Maarten Post
When I started working at national newspaper De Telegraaf 15 years ago, the editor-in-chief said on my first day: “The aim is: at least one story or photo with an animal on every domestic page. That will go down well with readers.”
I am now team lead Public Engagement at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. And I still experience daily that love for animals cuts across all levels of education and ages and thus offers wonderful opportunities to bridge the gap to a wide audience. Recently, two researchers were keen to reach out to animal owners to participate in research on fireworks anxiety. We created a reel for Instagram and tapped into the right Facebook groups. Within a week, we found 2,000 participants.
People also engaged unsolicited with what we do at the faculty. For instance, the Vegan Student Association (VSA) started a petition against additional chicken enclosures. In response, the researchers invited them to explain what research they want to do in the enclosures. It turned into an open conversation about the usefulness and necessity of animal testing and eating meat. The VSA is going to follow us critically, but also look in its constituency for people who want to adopt chickens after research. It was a nice ‘reverse’ example of public engagement: the VSA was concerned about a social phenomenon (animal testing) and wanted to know more about it, entered into a dialogue with the people affected (our researchers in this case) and was then willing to adjust its own plans (the announced demonstration became an adoption campaign).
I grant us more of that as a university. Because I know we want to align our research and teaching with the big social issues. But I notice that it is still not always easy to really let ourselves be influenced. Sometimes, for example, there are partitions between faculties that get in the way of flexibility. Sometimes we would like to respond to a social question, but it is difficult to acquire external funding, think for example of research on keeping calves with cows. I think it is very cool to see how the conversation about the importance of public engagement is getting off the ground within the university and faculty. And how people like Arend Schot and Chiel Jonker manage to do this in practice. They really have a good story for De Telegraaf.
Maarten Post is team lead Public Engagement at the Department of Communication and Multimedia at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine