Boehringer Ingelheim

Boehringer Ingelheim

Changing behaviour to improve cattle welfare

Context

People care for farm animals, design the environments they live in, develop products to enable animal health and wellbeing, consume animal products, and set policies about welfare standards. Boehringer Ingelheim’s Farm Animal Well Being initiative knows that to effect change, it ultimately needs to understand and change the behaviour of people – especially farmers and veterinarians. It asked Innovia to design a behaviour-change programme to improve cattle wellbeing.

Approach

We led a workshop in an international forum, establishing consensus amongst a diverse group of stakeholders to focus our work on improving pain management during assisted calving.

We conducted literature reviews and interviews with key stakeholders to define and explore the behaviours involved in “gold-standard” pain management during assisted calving. We designed a portfolio of behaviour-change interventions that were acceptable to stakeholders and likely to change behaviour.

Impact

Behavioural science has rarely been applied to veterinary challenges. This created an opportunity for Boehringer Ingelheim to showcase its pioneering approaches to improving animal wellbeing, both in an international forum and in media communications.

The consensus-building exercise created trust in the process for both Boehringer Ingelheim and the broader stakeholders with whom it wanted to engage.

We developed a range of intervention ideas focused on assisted calving that formed the basis of practical interventions to ultimately improve cattle wellbeing.

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