Reporting animal welfare violations isn’t solely the responsibility of veterinarians, says Chris Clark of the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine.
Veterinarians must consider animal welfare as part of every visit to a farm, he told attendees at the recent Cross Border Livestock Health conference in Saskatoon, and as educators make recommendations to correct problems.
In severe cases, the veterinarian can report violations to authorities, but, he argued, veterinarians aren’t the most effective first line of defence.
“We just will not see the worst offenders,” he said. “The worst offenders wouldn’t spend money to have a veterinarian on farm and so everybody has to consider reporting welfare breaches their responsibility.”
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He delivered that message at the conference, held in conjunction with the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region summit, to an audience of public- and private-sector representatives concerned with Canada-U.S. cross-border trade.
“It becomes vitally important that producers consider themselves always part of a much larger industry,” Clark told the group.
“It becomes that sort of second thought that when you look at your neighbours … and you look at their farm and think, ‘That place looks terrible,’ you have to ask yourself, ‘What is the welfare of those animals there and what would the impact be on my industry if someone sent photographs of that farm to a national publication?’ ”
Recent initiatives from large restaurant chains — Tim Hortons and McDonald’s have both made moves to eliminate gestation stalls for sows, for example — have been driven by pressure from the public, not producers.
“There’s an agenda being driven here with people defining what welfare problems are. The general public is reacting to that, but the general public really is terribly uninformed and you often end up with knee-jerk reactions,” said Clark.
“… you can start something, it spreads rapidly through the media, you end up with pressure being put on large multinational organizations and they’re sort of backed into a corner and forced to respond. But at no point is there ever a debate about whether welfare is truly being impacted and whether the alternative is any better.”
The national Farm Animal Care Council has an ongoing project to update its guidelines for the care and handling of animals. Its code of practice for beef cattle is to be completed in spring 2013.
The group charged with updating the code will examine issues of painful procedures, feedlot health and morbidity, housing and weaning after consulting with scientists and industry stakeholders.
“Those codes of practice set a line in the sand, which we can refer to, which we can use, as a nationally accredited standard, so we can use the experience of all the experts who drew those codes of practice together, so we’re not always forced into a situation of trying to make the definition for ourselves,” said Clark.
Several of provincial farm animal councils also operate service lines where violations can be reported.
