Born Country: Animal Welfare

Saturday, June 04, 2011

Why Animal Welfare Just Makes Sense

Animal welfare is the quality of life of an animal.

“Animal welfare is a human responsibility that encompasses all aspects of animal well-being, including proper housing, management, nutrition, disease prevention, responsible care, humane handling, and, where necessary, humane euthanasia.”

- Canadian Veterinary Medical Association

A common concern among both producers and consumers is animal welfare. Besides the compassion that we as humans all share for animals, there are also numerous economic reasons why animal welfare just makes sense!

When an animal is stressed due to heat, anxiety, rough treatment or environmental noise, meat quality can suffer. If an animal becomes agitated, adrenalin is released. If this occurs in the plant, it can damage the meat of the animals intended for slaughter. In cattle, this can result in “dark cutters,” or dark spots, in meat. In hogs, adrenalin release can causes a condition called Pale Soft Exudative (PSE) tissue, which appears as pale, soft spots in pork. These quality defects cause direct economic losses to meat companies.

Dark Cutter (Beef)

Pale Soft Exudative tissue (Pork)

Besides in the slaughter plant, there are also a strong incentives to treat animals humanely on the ranch. For example, the use of electric prods causes breeding sows to fear people. Research has shown that sows that are fearful of people will farrow fewer piglets. Therefore, farmers who treat their livestock humanely will benefit from a higher yield. Clearly, nature has provided us with many incentives to giving our animals optimum care by making it both ethically sound and economically beneficial.

Alberta Farm Animal Care (AFAC) is an association started in 1993 by the livestock producers of Alberta to:

promote responsible, humane animal care;
engage in discussion with the public;
monitor and participate in issues and legislation, and;
encourage animal care research.

AFAC, working with industry, has collaborated on:

open communication with livestock protection agencies;
animal welfare curriculum with agriculture colleges;
livestock handling and care guidelines, reports and training programs;
communicating to the public that farmers care for their animals with interactive display, education resources and publications.