EDMONTON – Fast food giants McDonalds and Wendy’s have done more in one year to improve cattle handling facilities in packing plants than has been done in the past 25 years, says a livestock behavior specialist.
Temple Grandin told an animal care conference here last week that it all comes down to accountability. Restaurant giants want to reassure their customers their meat comes from packing plants where animals are treated in the most humane way possible.
Last year the restaurant chains hired Grandin to audit packing plants where they buy their meat to make sure the plants met guidelines she wrote a few years for the American Meat Institute.
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“When you have major customers insisting on standards it’s amazing what it will do to the plant,” Grandin told the Alberta Farm Animal Care Conference.
Significant improvements
In 1996, a United States Department of Agriculture study from 10 packing plants showed only 30 percent of the animals were rendered instantly insensible with one shot from a captive bolt gun. In 1999 that average jumped to 74 percent.
When the two worst packing plant offenders were removed from the list, the average jumped to 96.6 percent of the animals properly stunned.
“The data clearly show that the audit program conducted by McDonalds has resulted in a greater percentage of slaughter plants which are now in compliance with the guidelines,” Grandin said.
She did a similar audit in Canada in 1999, but only about 60 percent of the plants passed.
“The U.S. is now ahead of Canada.”
Fortunately, most of the problems were corrected by simple changes like changing the lighting, adding non-slip grating in the stunning box, replacing worn-out stun guns or eliminating air blowing in the animal’s face.
Of the 42 plants checked in the U.S., only two needed major renovations.
In 1997, Grandin was hired by the American Meat Institute to develop a simple way to check if packing plants treated animals in the most humane way possible.
She devised a system of counting cattle’s moos or pig’s squeals in the stunning area and if the animals were unconscious on the bleed rail.
“You’ve got to have a very simple system. If you don’t make it simple to practice, they don’t work.”
If more than three percent of the cattle are mooing, something is wrong, she said.
“If the animal balks, (the plants) need to fix the problem, not get out a bigger prod.”
In some plants she eliminated balking by simple changes like adding lights.
In the Canadian audit, Grandin looked at beef, pork, veal, horse, poultry and kosher plants. Two of the four provincial plants passed the audit on stunning and handling and nine out of 15 of the federally inspected plants passed.
The main causes of poor stunning were improper equipment, lack of adjustment or maintenance of equipment, agitated animals or wet cartridges.
Two of the worst offenders were large hog plants where they had excessive use of prods, she said.
