TORONTO – Brazil’s animal welfare conditions are slowly improving, says the executive director of a food animal initiative in that country to improve animal welfare and meat quality.
“There are people who are … doing things well on beef and pork and chicken production but there are also animals facing problems,” Muriki Quintiliano told a recent animal welfare conference sponsored by the Canadian Meat Council in Toronto.
“I think it is the same in every country.”
He said Brazil has issued general policy statements of good care practices, but most are not descriptive.
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Slaughter numbers in Brazil are pegged at about eight million broiler chickens and about 82 million combined for all other species.
Poultry tends to be slaughtered close to where it is raised and takes place mainly in the south, while the largest beef industry is located in the west-central region.
Quintiliano said packers are moving closer to where animals are produced to reduce travel time and related exhaustion, fear, dehydration, bruising and stress during transport.
More than 1,100 people have been trained on farms and at slaughterhouses on how to do things properly to reduce animal suffering and improve meat quality.
The main difficulty in many Brazilian abattoirs is getting proper stunning and bleeding equipment. There is too little maintenance and workers don’t know how to use equipment properly.
“In a slaughterhouse, most of them don’t have enough people to do the monitoring,” Quintiliano said.
He said 65 percent of hogs transported long distance have bruises and lesions, which has prompted the introduction of driver training courses.
“Sometimes the drivers just don’t know,” he said.
“If the animal goes onto the truck in bad condition or stress, we try to show it will be a problem in transportation.”
Sometimes animal injury is not the driver’s fault but the result of being jostled over rough roads for long distances.
Some of the motivation to change came from a Brazilian grocery chain that had problems with its beef supply. Management wanted a welfare program to solve carcass problems because it would often reject 12 animals out of every 100 delivered.
Worker training has resulted in some improvement in the way animals are handled from the time they are loaded at the farm until they arrive at a slaughterhouse.
“Everything in the whole process needs improvement,” Quintiliano said.
LIVESTOCK SLAUGHTER STATISTICS FOR BRAZIL
•45.4 million cattle
•30.6 million pigs
•More than eight billion broilers
•Six million other species
Source: Welfare and Ethics of Production Animals, Brazil
