The welfare and treatment of animals is of utmost importance to the Animal Care and Management Industry. Industry can now access units of competency that reflect safe and ethical practices for caring for animals in a range of environments.
Industry drove the process to update these skills standards, contributing to projects in animal technology, animal incident management, and horse education. Over the past year, feedback has been collected from around the country to draft new and revised units that address skills needs and better reflect job roles.
These skills standards are now published on training.gov.au, within the ACM Animal Care and Management Training Package and are available for use by registered training organisations in the form of qualifications, skill sets, and units.
Click through to the individual project pages for further details.
Animal Technology Project
Thanks to the input of stakeholders across Australia, the skills required to care for laboratory animals have been revised and captured. The unique skills standards for this job role have been embedded in units of competency, which make up three qualifications for animal technicians and one new skill set in animal ethics.
“My position within the ANZLAA committee allowed me to reach out to over 300 members around Australia to encourage involvement with the review process to assure that only current and best practices are included in the qualification. The response from the industry was overwhelming with many people assisting in the review process, offering their knowledge in their areas of expertise.” Paula Porter, TAFE SA
Animal Incident Management Project
Rescuing large animals or groups of animals during an emergency requires unique skills and knowledge. Fire and rescue, veterinarians, farmers, council rangers and transporters routinely deal with incidents involving domestic animals or wildlife. The safety and welfare of people and animals in these circumstances is paramount, and training is essential to achieving this.
Thanks to the contributions of experts in the field, the specific units of competency for managing incidents involving large animals or groups of animals have been reviewed and where necessary new units created, in order to support training for this important work. These units have been included in a qualification and three skills sets.
Horse Education Project
Throughout this project, industry have contributed knowledge in various skills for educating horses, from basic handling skills, to interpreting equine behaviour, transporting horses and educating horses to be ridden and driven. Horses are capable of amazing things, but before a horse can to learn to race, jump, show or participate in dressage, it needs to be educated to wear riding equipment and learn to be ridden. Thanks to the hard work of industry, new and updated units addressing skills for educating horses are now available for use.
One unit for microchipping of cats and dogs has also been updated to support the comfort and welfare of animals being microchipped.
