About Mellorater

Mellorater is a free app in development, currently being pilot tested. The aim is to create a tool that helps animal guardians reflect on their management practices, monitor their animals’ life-world, and identify opportunities to improve daily experiences.

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When launched, we hope that regular use of Mellorater will allow guardians to track conditions across the nutrition, environment, and health domains, as well as capture behavioural interactions with surroundings, conspecifics, and humans.

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At present, the app asks animal owners and guardians to use a five-point Likert scale to rate their agreement with 18 statements covering nutrition, environment, health, and behavioural interactions. It has been approved for study to investigate how the use of such scales may differ between species.

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Mellorater is not intended as a validated welfare auditing tool, because it relies on reflective self-reporting and is therefore influenced by user subjectivity. However, we anticipate that if users’ ratings are consistent over time, the longitudinal data may provide useful proxies for trends in quality of life. In the longer term, with the integration of scientifically validated, species-specific indicators, the app could be adapted for use by specialist auditors.

We provide this information to clarify the intentions behind the app, to invite animal welfare scholars and animal guardians to participate in its development, and to be transparent about what Mellorater can and cannot do at this stage.

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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/