Animal Welfare Science, Ethics & Law [MSc] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of the calls I take as a customer adviser for a pet insurer are about money, but the questions underneath them are often about welfare. Last spring a caller asked whether her policy covered sessions with a behaviourist for a dog that had started guarding its food bowl. The wording said behavioural treatment was covered only when referred by a vet. Explaining that clause several times a week has made me notice how much an animal's care depends on definitions written by people who will never meet it. I want to study animal welfare science alongside ethics and law because I have seen, in a very ordinary setting, how the three meet.

My undergraduate degree in Animal Behaviour gave me the scientific foundation. Modules in ethology, physiology and research methods taught me to separate what an animal does from what I assume it feels. That distinction became the centre of my dissertation. With permission from a local riding school, I filmed twelve horses in their stables and turnout paddocks over six weeks. I then asked three groups, riding-school staff, students on my course and people with no horse experience, to score short clips using Qualitative Behaviour Assessment. This method, developed by Françoise Wemelsfelder and colleagues, asks observers to rate an animal's demeanour with terms such as 'relaxed', 'alert' or 'uneasy'. I compared agreement within and between the groups. Experienced staff agreed most closely with each other, but they also scored some horses as more relaxed than the other groups did, which raised the question of whether familiarity sharpens judgement or softens it. My sample was small and I could not resolve that, but analysing the data in R and writing up the limitations honestly taught me more than a tidy result would have.

The project also showed me that welfare assessment is never only technical. Deciding which behaviours count, and who is trusted to judge them, involves values. Reading Marian Stamp Dawkins's Why Animals Matter helped me think about this. Her argument that welfare questions can be framed around whether animals are healthy and whether they have what they want seemed useful to me precisely because it is simple enough to test. I have since compared it with the Five Domains model, which gives more weight to positive experiences, and I am interested in how far either approach could be built into practical standards.

Law is the area where I have least formal training, and the one I most want to develop. At work I deal with contracts daily, and I have read the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006 to understand how a duty of care is set out in statute. I would like to learn how courts and regulators interpret broad phrases like 'unnecessary suffering', and how scientific evidence is used, or ignored, when standards are drafted.

Outside work I read local news aloud each week for a talking newspaper for blind and partially sighted listeners. It has made me careful about clear, plain explanation, which also helps on the phones when a worried owner needs a policy explained without jargon. I swim in a reservoir most weekends from May to October, and I am a dependable member of the small group that organises safety cover and checks water temperatures.

I am applying for postgraduate study now because I want to move from explaining rules to understanding how they are made and whether they serve the animals they concern. In the longer term I would like to work in welfare policy, perhaps for an animal charity or a standards body, where careful evidence and clear writing can shape the definitions that so many owners and animals rely on.