Improving the health and welfare of dairy animals is a major focus within our research.

• We are the lead organisation for DairyCare, a COST Action that provides networking support for dairy animal wellbeing researchers from 28 different EU and international countries
• As dairy farms get bigger, the need for technologies that assist good husbandry grows. Dairy-ICT is our ERA Net funded project that is developing new approaches to welfare biomarkers, activity monitoring for feeding behaviour and lameness detection and milk metabolomics for detecting sub-acute ruminal acidosis. Our teleonomic smart-system will use these and other data to idenitfy cows in need of special attention and provide simple course-of-action advice to the farmer
• We have ongoing MSc projects concerned with the measurement of chronic stress in different species (dogs, cattle, mink) using hair cortisol
• Our mastitis research uses a mouse model to differentiate between inflammatory responses to pathogens versus inflammation due to milk accumulation. Download pdf proof of Journal of Dairy Research paper here