On-farm conditions that compromise animal welfare that can be monitored at the slaughter plant

Abstract

Handling and stunning at slaughter plants has greatly improved through the use of numerical scoring. The purpose of this paper is to encourage the use of numerical scoring systems at the slaughter plants to assess conditions that compromise welfare that occurred either during transport or on the farm. Some of the transport problems that can be assessed are bruises, death losses, and injured animals. Welfare issues that occurred on the farm that can be assessed at the abattoir are body condition, lameness, lesions, injuries, animal cleanliness and internal pathology. There are important welfare issues that cannot be assessed at slaughter. They are on-farm euthanasia methods, use of analgesics during surgeries, and the type of animal housing systems. Welfare evaluations at slaughter have the potential to greatly improve welfare.

Animal-Based Measures to Assess the Welfare of Extensively Managed Ewes

“…Body condition is widely accepted as a valid and important welfare measure that reflects the nutritional state of sheep [13,14]. Results in the present study suggests that a quarter-point scale is reliable, but that operators require sufficient training and experience to achieve high agreement in this measurement [27,35,36]. In this study, the experienced observers (TSO, observers 2 and 7) showed the highest agreement and repeatability for this measure.…”

Pre-slaughter cattle welfare indicators for use in commercial abattoirs with voluntary monitoring systems: A systematic review

“…Apple (1999) mentioned that BCS can be useful to both cow-calf producers and slaughter-cow processors in making market decisions. Measuring BCS can be considered highly feasible, however, some scores have too many categories and suffer from inter-observer variability (Grandin, 2017). Halachmi, Klopcic, Polak, Roberts, & Bewley (2013) report that results depend on the person scoring, familiarity with the cows, and consistency between scoring periods, suggesting the use of a device for automatic (objective) monitoring of body condition, such as thermographic cameras or ultrasound scanning.…”

“…Loading and unloading conditions will influence the quality of lairage time; however, lairage under poor conditions will also affect animal behaviour. Grandin (2017) mentions the wide variation among cattle behaviour during lairage, based on reports by abattoir personnel; cattle can be difficult or easy to move and the former are more likely to be abused. That may be explained by differences in emotional reactivity, i.e., the tendency to show pronounced reactions to different fear-inducing situations (Bourguet et al, 2010).…”

“…The drive to the stunning box can be stressful, depending on the length and design of the chute and the quality of the HAR. Vocalizations due to electric prod use, balking, refusing to move, backing up and turning around are indicators that can be compared between different producers animals (Grandin, 2017). Electric goads are very stressful for cattle.…”

“…On-farm welfare assessments are the main method for assessing cattle welfare, but those assessments are labor intensive, time consuming and may even increase disease transmission within and between farms (Dalmau, Temple, Rodríguez, Llonch, & Velarde, 2009). Post-mortem meat inspection has the potential to more easily detect diseases and certain welfare conditions which may not be apparent during ante-mortem inspection of the animal upon arrival to the abattoir (Vial & Reist, 2014;Grandin, 2017). In the past, welfare audits have been developed and tested as instruments for research or commercial requirements for documenting animal welfare at the abattoir level.…”