About Mellorater

Mellorater is a free app that helps you monitor your animal’s life-world, so you can make better management decisions and improve their daily experiences. By completing the Mellorater on a regular basis, animal guardians can track their animal's conditions across the nutrition, environment and health domains, as well as capture how they interact with their surroundings and other animals, including humans.

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Mellorater asks animal owners and guardians to use a five-point Likert scale to identify their level of agreement with 18 statements about the animal’s nutrition, environment, health and behavioural interactions. It has been approved as part of a study to reveal how the use of such scales may differ between species. The Mellorater is not proposed as a validated welfare auditing tool because it relies on reflective, self-reporting and, as such, is vulnerable to the user’s subjectivity. That said, by selecting and applying scientifically validated, species-specific indicators, it has potential to be used by specialist auditors. If users’ subjectivity is stable over time, then the longitudinal data that the app generates may be considered useful proxies for trends in quality-of-life. We offer this information to summarize the intentions behind the app, to invite animal welfare scholars, as a well as animal owners and guardians to use it, and to clarify what it can do and what it cannot do.  

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The Mellorater app is an easy-to-use checklist to ensure you are taking all the necessary steps to provide your animal with a happy and healthy life.

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Mellorater © 2024 by William Billingsley, Bidda Jones, Paul McGreevy, Cristina Wilkins is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/