The Science of Animal Welfare

Marian Stamp Dawkins is professor of animal behavior in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and has a long record of working successfully with poultry producers to improve animal health and welfare. She is the author of numerous research papers, and her books include Through Our Eyes Only?: The Search for Animal Consciousness, Why Animals Matter: Animal Consciousness, Animal Welfare, and Human Well-Being, and with Aubrey Manning, An Introduction to Animal Behaviour. She now leads a team that that is developing an on-farm system for assessing welfare by automatically processing CCTV images of group behavior.

Esther Wane is a British actor and voice-over artist. After a career in finance Esther fulfilled a childhood dream of going to drama school in London, and her life as an actor began at age forty. She has a lifelong passion for literature and can often be found browsing bookshops at any spare moment. She owes her career in audiobooks to her impression of Joanna Lumley and has since narrated books in many genres, including memoir, politics, romantic fiction, and children's literature. She enjoys taking her listeners on a journey in time and space and bringing the characters on the page to life in their imagination. She lives with her family and collection of books in Hertfordshire, just outside London, where she has built a professional voice studio in the bottom of her garden.