It’s only three years old, but those with the Animal Welfare Approved program believe the group has the best standards for farm animal welfare in North America.
It has the support of America’s most famous environmentalist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“The gold standard for how farm animals should be taken care of,” reads Kennedy’s quote on the company’s website.
Animal Welfare Approved, a division of the not for profit Animal Welfare Institute in the United States, audits family farms in the program to determine if they meet or exceed its standards. Certified farms can use the program’s labels in their marketing.
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Andrew Gunther, program director for Animal Welfare Approved, says its standards are the best because it covers animals from birth to slaughter and is based solely in science.
“Our science has to be peer-reviewed, so it’s not just industry funded or a welfare-funded piece of science,” he said.
“We’ve designed a set of standards that are practical in their implementation but based in very, very strict science.”
The organization’s comprehensive codes of practice for livestock production include hundreds of clauses covering topics from castration to euthanasia, but Gunther said they are practical.
“You can’t have a standard that says at 3 on a Tuesday afternoon, cow number 246 has to turn right,” he said.
“But an animal can be raised in a way that is best for the animal and slaughtered in a way that is best for the animal.”
The program acts as an independent agency to verify that farmers are handling, housing and managing livestock in a specified way.
“We are truly third party. I have no vested interest in passing your farm,” said Gunther, who raised ducks and chickens in the United Kingdom before moving to the U.S. He now lives in Austin, Texas.
Animal Welfare Approved will put its seal only on meat products from family farms.
Gunther said family farmers have a vested interest in their livestock, which enhances the opportunity for animal welfare improvements.
“There’s significant information that family farmers are better custodians of livestock than those that are dictated to by the larger agricultural sector,” he said.
“The potential for the greatest welfare outcome is when an individual has an investment: physical, financial or emotional.”
For Patricia Whisnant, a producer of grass fed beef in southern Missouri, meeting the standards and using the Animal Welfare Approved seal is part of a larger mission – to preserve the family farm.
“My real passion is that our American family farms, Canadian too, that they will survive in this world of the mega, behemoth operations,” said Whisnant, who with her husband and six children also operate a 250 head per week slaughter plant.
The Whisnants, through their American Grass Fed Beef brand, direct market meat to consumers and also sell it through retailers such as Whole Foods.
The seal’s animal welfare credibility is just part of the sales pitch, Whisnant said. Other slogans include grass fed, family farm and direct from gate to plate.
“That’s kind of what has the big appeal with the target market,” she said.
Anecdotal evidence has convinced Whisnant that animal welfare is vital to her customers.
“A lot of these people are very in tune to animal welfare issues,” she said.
“Through our website, probably one of the most asked questions has to do with humane handling and especially if they’re slaughtered in a humane way.”
Whisnant thinks meat buyers interest in welfare certification will grow.
“I think if you take your average consumer and if they can look at two products side by side, and one they know is verified as being humanely treated, I think the majority of your consumers are going to choose that.”
Surveys have found that European consumers are keenly interested in animal welfare. In a European Commission study from 2007, 60 percent of respondents said they consider livestock welfare most of the time or some of the time when buying meat.
Jeffrey Rushen, a research scientist at Agriculture Canada’s research centre in Agassiz, B.C., said a referendum held in California last fall shows what the results would be if a similar question was asked in North America.
“Well I guess the best study was Proposition 2 in California,” said Rushen, who specializes in dairy cattle welfare.
“Sixty odd percent of people voted in favour of it, so that’s a pretty strong statement.”
By voting for the proposition, California voters ensured that beginning in 2015, state law will prohibit, with certain exceptions, the confinement on a farm of pregnant pigs, calves raised for veal and egg-laying hens in a way that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up and fully extend their limbs.
Rushen said the Proposition 2 campaign showed the nasty tone of the animal welfare debate in the U.S.
“It’s become very polarized in the U.S., so it’s very hard for the two sides to even sit in the same room.”
In contrast, Canadian welfare groups and industry associations have not formed hardened positions, Rushen said, pointing to his recent work with the Dairy Farmers of Canada. The producer group worked with the National Farm Animal Care Council to develop a new code of practice for the care and handling of dairy cattle.
“That’s the approach we’ve tried to take in Canada, is make it more collaborative,” he said.
Rushen thinks Animal Welfare Approved labelling could work in Canada, but he thinks consumers don’t want to be put in a tight spot.
“What the surveys tend to show is that most people don’t want to choose on the basis of animal welfare. They want to know that whatever they buy, the animals have been raised humanely.”
The preferred solution, he said, is all sides working together to ensure that livestock are raised to certain standards.
