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Abstract：
When monitoring an animal\'s welfare, it helps to have comprehensive and day-to-day information about the animal\'s life. The goal is to ensure that animal guardians (carers, keepers, and owners) use such information to act in the animals\' best interests. This article introduces the Mellorater, an animal welfare monitoring app based on the 2020 Five Domains Model. This framework provides a means of capturing comprehensive information about the world in which individual animals exist. The Mellorater asks animal guardians to rate their agreement with 18 statements covering any focal animal\'s nutrition, environment, health, and behavioural interactions using a five-point Likert scale. No specialist training is required other than following straightforward instructions on using the app, which are provided. The Mellorater is not proposed as a validated welfare auditing tool because it relies on reflective self-reporting and, thus, is vulnerable to the user\'s subjectivity. If users\' subjectivity is stable over time, then the longitudinal data may be considered useful proxies for trends in quality of life. That said, it has the potential to be used by trained auditors if scientifically validated, species-specific indicators are applied. The Mellorater collects anonymous data and has been approved for a study to explore how the use of such scales may differ among guardians of different species and in different contexts. In this paper, we conduct the following: (1) summarise the app\'s purposes; (2) clarify its capabilities and limitations; and (3) invite animal welfare scholars, veterinarians, health and welfare professionals, and animal guardians to use it.
摘要：
当监视动物的福利时，它有助于获得有关动物生活的全面和日常信息。目标是确保动物监护人(看护者，饲养员，和所有者)使用这些信息来为动物的最佳利益行事。这篇文章介绍了Mellorater，基于2020年五域模型的动物福利监测应用程序。该框架提供了一种捕获有关个体动物存在的世界的全面信息的方法。Mellorater要求动物监护人对他们同意的18项声明进行评分，这些声明涵盖了任何重点动物的营养，环境,健康,和行为互动使用五点李克特量表。除了遵循使用该应用程序的简单说明之外，不需要专业培训，提供的。Mellorater没有被提议作为一个经过验证的福利审计工具，因为它依赖于反思性的自我报告，因此，容易受到用户主观性的影响。如果用户的主观性随着时间的推移是稳定的，那么纵向数据可能被认为是生活质量趋势的有用代理。那就是说,如果经过科学验证，它有可能被训练有素的审计师使用，应用特定物种的指标。Mellorater收集匿名数据，并已被批准用于一项研究，以探索在不同物种和不同背景下，此类量表的使用如何在不同物种的监护人之间有所不同。在本文中,我们进行以下操作：（1）总结应用程序的目的；（2）阐明其功能和局限性；（3）邀请动物福利学者，兽医,健康和福利专业人员，和动物监护人使用它。
