Thomas D. Parsons, VMD, PhD, DACAW, was recently named the Marie A. Moore Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics in the Department of Clinical Studies–New Bolton Center. Dr. Parsons has expertise in swine medicine and behavior and is also the Director of Penn Vet’s Swine Teaching and Research Center.
Dr. Parsons’ experience with pigs started at a young age, as he was raised on a diversified family farm in western Massachusetts that grew both crops and livestock, including pigs. The family farm continues today, and his nephew is the 10th generation of Parsons to work land deeded to their family by King George. It has been said that the second-best thing that a farmer’s son can do is to become a veterinarian—with staying home to take over the farm being the preferred option. Once his brother decided to forgo an academic career as a swine nutritionist and return home to take over the farm, Dr. Parsons was freed to pursue a journey that has taken him around the world, to human medicine and back, and perhaps ironically left him more or less where he started as a child—at home with the pigs.
Dr. Parsons developed an interest in the nervous system as an undergraduate at Amherst College. He was considering a career in medical research when as a junior he discovered Penn’s Veterinary Medical Scientist Training Program and realized he might be able to keep his ties to agriculture while diving into fundamental research. Dr. Parsons went on to receive both his VMD and PhD from Penn. As a veterinary student, Dr. Parsons was required to pay special attention to lectures on pigs so that he would be able to answer his father’s questions. While this laid the foundation for his interest in swine medicine, Dr. Parsons left Penn to pursue post-doctoral training in basic neuroscience. He ended up at the Max Planck Institute for Biomedical Research in Heidelberg, Germany to work with Drs. Wolfhard Almers and Bert Sakmann (the latter of whom won The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1991). It was here that he became fascinated with the auditory system and performed seminal experiments on the unusual synaptic properties of cochlear hair cells.
Dr. Parsons was recruited back to Penn Vet’s Department of Clinical Studies–New Bolton Center to help develop a clinical program in swine medicine and was encouraged to continue his work in the basic sciences. He established a collaboration and later gained laboratory space in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology in the Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Parsons spent his first ten years as a faculty member pursuing fundamental research on human hearing and deafness. He also worked to establish swine medicine at Penn Vet by dividing his time between the Philadelphia and New Bolton Center campuses. During this time, Dr. Parsons had the opportunity to design and build a new swine facility at Penn Vet. His time spent living in Germany had provided an opportunity to experience a different relationship with food, as European expectations were higher for both the quality of the product as well as how it was raised. Anticipating that these changing views about food would eventually travel across the Atlantic Ocean, Dr. Parsons used the new swine facility for the first study of alternatives to gestation stalls and farrowing crates carried out at an academic institution in the United States (US), thus heralding a new focus on food animal welfare.
Over the next five years, public interest in animal welfare grew in the US and Dr. Parsons began shifting his efforts away from the auditory system to concentrate on swine behavior and welfare; reinventing himself as an applied ethologist. He was instrumental in helping nearly 100 farms across the US transition from stalls to pens with over 200,000 sows being fed with the welfare-friendly management systems originally prototyped at the swine center. He also built one of the largest research groups in the US working on sow housing and welfare.
Dr. Parsons and his collaborators helped establish the concept of personality types in pigs, revealing that these behavioral differences are established early in the pig’s life and robust over time and context. Individual behavioral differences in animals speak to the complexity of animal welfare and has important implications when considering facility design as well as establishing welfare standards. Dr. Parsons’ group was also the first to apply judgement bias tasks to ask questions about gestating sows’ welfare. This experimental paradigm, adapted from human psychology, exploits the tendency of our mood or emotional state to impact our judgements. Judgement bias aims to reveal an animal’s affect state (mood) by determining how sows interpret or judge ambiguous cues. Animals with a positive bias (read optimistic) will treat an ambiguous cue in the same way as known positive cues, whereas pessimistic animals will respond as though the cue was negative. Taken together, this work helps us to better understand the emotional experience of farm animals.
Many unanswered questions remain about pig behavior and welfare. Application of wearable devices (piggy Fitbits) and computerized vision systems supported by artificial intelligence are the current foci of Dr. Parsons’ research team and promise to give us new insights into animal production and welfare. His work fits into a larger rubric of societal concerns about animal agriculture now at the forefront of public discourse. Emerging questions about social justice, diversity, equity, and climate management highlight the complexity of today’s food systems and delineate additional opportunities for improvement in animal agriculture. Penn Vet looks forward to launching a new center in the fall that addresses these challenges. With Dr. Parsons as the head of the new center based at the New Bolton Center campus, its mission aims to make animal agriculture part of the solution to a more livable future.