Let's talk about detection and treatment of pain to improve animal welfare? Scientific divulgation of the thematic project "Pain and quality of life in animals"

Abstract

Science is a human tool that allows us to build solid, reliable and useful knowledge. Nevertheless, much of this knowledge is restricted to scientific environment, and most Brazilians are unaware about our own science and even where it is usually developed. In this scenario, although scientific findings and other issues related to the scientific field of Life Sciences naturally obtain greater media coverage and seemingly arouse greater interest from the Brazilian population, people usually understand little about issues in this area, a problem reflected even in the university. Thus, quality scientific communication should help to minimize this problem, especially through scientific journalism, which is a tool that helps not only to disseminate appropriate scientific information to non-specialized people, but also seeks to stimulate a critical and reflective view of these information. In the field of Life Sciences, animal welfare is relatively recent and, among the several aspects involved in the concept of welfare, one of the main causes of animal suffering stands out: pain. How to detect pain in a valid, consistent, and simple way, and treat it aiming to improve the life quality of domestic animals? This is the main issue investigated in the thematic project entitled "Pain and quality of life in animals", which is supported by FAPESP and is under development at FMVZ, UNESP, campus of Botucatu (SP), being the focus of this proposal of scientific journalism research. Thus, we propose to divulge scientific findings related to this thematic project to a mainly young audience, of non-specialized people, through the use of scientific journalism tools, aiming to increase the popular perception of the importance and significance of these findings in the area of animal welfare. For this, we propose to produce and publish news, articles, reports, podcasts, spots and video, which will be published both in the already existing media of the thematic project (http://www.animalpain.com.br/) and by other divulgation vehicles, highlighting the electronic magazine ComCiência and the podcast Oxygen. Such vehicles have regular and frequent periodicity, besides being focused in the scientific divulgation of materials produced by students of Labjor, Laboratory of Advanced Studies in Journalism from UNICAMP, where the candidate currently develops a Specialization Course in Scientific Journalism.