Dr Harold Gonyou joined the Prairie Swine Centre as a research scientist in ethology at its inception in the summer of 1992.

Last month, he was inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Applied Ethology, which operates worldwide, becoming the 16th person so be so honoured over the society's 45-year history.

Lee Whittington, the president and CEO of the Prairie Swine Centre, says Dr Gonyou's reach and involvement in the industry has been broad.

Lee Whittington –– Prairie Swine Centre

I think there's several really good examples of the things that Dr Gonyou was able to accomplish.

They go all the way from what we might think is relatively simple like how to select and adjust a feeder.

Prior to his work in that, there was quite a controversy whether or not people should be working with wet-dry feeders in grow-finish or simply dry feeders.

After two years of work, it came down quite soundly that waste would be minimised and average daily gain would be optimised when you were working with wet-dry feeders.

We had seven different feeders in that study that I recall and five of the them, following that trial, five of those manufacturers went out and changed their designs based on the type of work that Harold was doing.

So, in a small way, that's the kind of impact that he's had.

Now of course throughout North America and even in Europe, the wet-dry feeder is the standard but that wasn't the case 20 years ago when we started doing that work.

Dr Whittington notes, since then, Dr Gonyou has been has been involved helping design and redesign large group auto-sort systems, his most recent projects include gestation sow housing looking at electronic sow feeders and walk in lock in or free access stalls and most recently transportation, looking at the impact of stress and the behaviour of the pig during loading and transport and their effect on meat quality.