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Seeing things from the livestock point of view Repairing the growing disconnect from ‘all practical things’ is critical to ensure simple, effective approaches to livestock welfare, says Dr. Temple Grandin. An office in Washington D.C. is about as far as a person can get from the hands-on world of handling livestock and looking out for their welfare. Yet this is where policy and legislation that affects animal welfare on farms, ranches and meat plants often gets developed. For Dr. Temple Grandin, this is one of the biggest challenges to making livestock welfare improvements. And the problem isn’t just limited to the Capitol – “10 square miles surrounded by reality,” she says – it’s a growing issue symptomatic of a society increasingly divorced from all things practical. Not only are policy makers cut off from day to day livestock management, so too are a new generation of students and workers, including those involved with the agriculture industry, who typically have little experience with practical things. As a result, legislative guidelines and those charged with following them are increasingly hampered by vague language and approaches that produce ineffective, inconsistent results. “We often hear about the disconnect between policy makers and agriculture,” says Grandin, a designer of livestock handling facilities, Associate Professor at Colorado State University and one of the world’s leading authorities on animal welfare issues. “But the disconnect is bigger than that. It’s a disconnect between people and all practical things.” To battle this trend, and in particular to support effective approaches to livestock handling and welfare, Grandin encourages a return to common sense strategies well grounded in first-hand observation and hands-on experience. This has been Grandin’s approach over more than 35 years of working with industry to improve livestock handling and welfare, and to develop objective, auditable standards for both. Grandin has designed facilities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. In North America, almost half of the cattle are handled at meat plants in a center track restrainer system that she designed for that purpose. Curved chute and race systems she has designed for cattle are used worldwide and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many people to reduce animal stress during handling. In a presentation at the Livestock Care Conference, April 4 in Red Deer, on “Are we there yet?” in livestock care, Grandin shared many of her observations and proven rules of thumb on how to handle livestock humanely and effectively. The conference was hosted by Alberta Farm Animal Care (AFAC), a partnership of Alberta’s major livestock groups with a mandate to promote responsible, humane animal care within the livestock industry. The following is an overview of some of the many nuggets of wisdom she delivered to the more than 230 livestock producers, students and other industry representatives in attendance. Learning practical things Grandin’s extensive knowledge of effective animal handling is rooted in her approach of looking at situations from the animal point of view, then using that knowledge to identify simple, practical ways to produce a desired outcome with minimal animal stress. When it comes to achieving low stress animal handling when guiding livestock from one area to another, this often involves looking for environmental factors that distract, cause hesitation or provoke fear in animals, then taking steps to remove or remedy those factors. For example, this may involve removing chains hanging over a chute, stopping dripping water, removing shadows or dark areas that are uninviting to the animals, or limiting changes in flooring. “For animal handling, I’ve been trying to teach people to look for these details that make the animals just stop,” says Grandin. “This means making the pathway more inviting and getting rid of things that can distract the animal.” Grandin’s approaches are based on common sense observations. For example calm animals are easier to handle than fearful animals, dark areas and reflections scare animals and a change in flooring may inhibit movement. Some less obvious but proven observations are that solid fences keep animals calmer and that curved systems work better than straight ones. Animals are calmed by the sensation of turning back in the same direction they came from. Often distractions are hard to see until a person looks at them from the animal’s point of view, she notes. “To see things how the animal sees them, you have to get right in there in the chute and have a look around.” Grandin’s systems are designed to complement what comes naturally for the animal. “One of the things I’ve preached for years is to use behavior to control an animal rather than force,” she says. “If you get rid of the distractions and the things they’re afraid of, they’ll walk right up the chute.” Measurable means manageable Much of Grandin’s work in recent years has included working with industry to develop auditable animal handling standards for meat plants and increasingly, for farms and ranches. She believes in systems based on measurable standards that allow for scoring. “When you use a scoring system, it prevents bad from becoming normal,” says Grandin. “Bad behavior can creep up on a person where they don’t realize it,” says Grandin. “Scoring takes the evaluation out of the subjective area of whether a person thinks they’re using a prod too much, to a clear score that shows exactly how much they’re using it.” Objective scoring of simple, observable behaviors also reduces the incidence of “creative cheaters” who use the wiggle room created by vaguely stated standards as a way to get around the intent of those standards. The best scoring systems are ones based on observable, objective standards that are simple to understand and evaluate. For example, one good scoring system developed for lameness includes evaluating leg condition according to four categories: 1) The leg is perfectly okay, 2) The leg has hairloss, 3) The leg has open cuts or bruising smaller than a baseball, 4) The leg has open cuts or bruising larger than a baseball. “That’s a nice, simple scoring system,” says Grandin. “I could teach someone that in less than five minutes.” The best systems in use today are based on Critical Control Points, which are measurable factors that are good indicators of the many details that go into proper handling and welfare, she says. “Finding the best indicators – that’s the trick,” says Grandin. “A lot of details go into good management. Each CPP captures a multitude of sins with one simple measurement. Among the most widely implemented of these in North America is the American Meat Institute Basic Critical Control Points. Core criteria measured in this system includes:
“A system like this produces scores that you can’t argue with and that don’t change depending on the auditor,” says Grandin. For setting a pass / fail cutoff, Grandin believes in approaches that encourage ongoing improvement. “When you first introduce these systems, you have to set the bar high enough so industry will improve, but not so high that people will give up and say it’s impossible.” Getting rid of vague standards Industry in North America has come a long way in implementing good auditable systems for livestock welfare, says Grandin. For the future, the priority is to continue to improve and increase the adoption of these systems, while an ongoing challenge is to avoid approaches and standards based on vague language and impractical solutions. “The problems arise when we have vague standards like ‘excessive prod use,’” she says. “Who determines what is excessive? That is really awful wording. I would like to ban all words subjective words like ‘adequately,’ ‘excessively,’ ‘properly,’ and the like. They don’t give us the clarity that we need.” Grandin recalled working with major food companies, including McDonalds and Burger King, in the late 1990s to develop welfare standards including auditable scoring systems. “It was when I took these people into the plant to see how things actually worked and what was actually going on, that I started to see eyes getting opened up. The abstraction was removed and they were able to see things more clearly. You need to have approaches that are grounded in reality in order to make improvements.” Many improvements have been made and there is still room for improvement, she says. One of the key for the industry moving forward will be to continue to be more open and transparent about its approaches and to continually build trust with customers and consumers. “I think more and more in agriculture, we have to look at everything we do and go how is this going to play on YouTube, or how is this going to play on the news. And at the same time, we better start putting stuff up on YouTube to show the good things we’re doing.” Systems that use video cameras and third party audits conducted remotely are not out of the question, she says. “We have to be open and let the public in.” This is one of the best ways to avoid abstraction, to ensure the public and the industry are on the same page, and to support solutions that don’t just pay lip service to an issue but result in simple, practical solutions. “We need clarity. Not abstract concepts that are subject to different interpretations by different people.”
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