Professor Donald Broom

at Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge

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Colleen Macleod Professor of Animal Welfare, Centre for Animal Welfare and Anthrozoology, Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge

Professor Donald Broom is Colleen Macleod Professor of Animal Welfare (Emeritus) in the Centre for Animal Welfare and Anthrozoology within the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the scientific assessment of animal welfare in relation to housing, transport and other interactions with people.

He is the author of over 200 refereed scientific papers and seven books. He is a Member of the Home Office Animal Procedures Committee and the E.U. Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare.

He graduated in Natural Sciences (Zoology) from Cambridge in 1964. He completed his Ph.D. there on behaviour development and responses of domestic chicks to startling stimuli in 1967, and later gained Cambridge's Sc.D. degree. From 1967 to 1986 he was Lecturer then Reader in the University of Reading, where he worked on behaviour and welfare of calves and dry sows in relation to housing; grazing behaviour of cattle and sheep; the role of behaviour in relation to the transmission of fish parasites, summer mastitis and bovine tuberculosis; olfactory and auditory communication in rodents and deer; salmonid behaviour; motivational mechanisms and the description of activity rhythms. He was a visiting professor, lecturer, researcher for three month periods in the University of California Berkeley 1969, the University of the West Indies Trinidad 1972 and CSIRO Perth in 1983. In 1986 Professor Broom was appointed the first Professor of Animal Welfare in the world in the Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge. He set up a research group, the Centre for Animal Welfare and Anthrozoology.