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Dr. Julia Keenliside
- Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development |
| Farmscape for April 8, 2003 (Episode 1216)
Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development suggests the new US 'Swine Welfare Assurance Program' could be a useful model for developing an on farm animal welfare audit for Canadian swine producers.
The US based National Pork Board launched its Swine Welfare Assurance Program, or SWAP, last month.
The Canadian Pork Council is currently exploring the prospects of developing a swine welfare audit as a voluntary module of Canadian Quality Assurance, its on farm food safety program.
Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development's Provincial Swine Veterinarian, Dr. Julia Keenliside, says the US program has a lot merit.
Clip-Dr. Julia Keenliside-Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development
I think some of the things we really liked, looking at the program, is right now it's very science based.
It's very objective, a lot of things are measured, a lot of things are checked, it's quite black and white.
Welfare can be a difficult area to assess and certainly we discovered that through food safety.
You have to make your requirements very clear.
You also have to make them applicable to a wide range of producers.
In other words it has to be very achievable given current production methods and this program is designed to be used on all types of facilities, indoors, outdoors, stalls, loose housing, any type of facility.
It's very structured.
You can train herd health veterinarians or other industry specialists to do the program.
It's also designed to only take a couple of hours to work through.
It's also designed to be very much educational and self assessment which was very important with our CQA program.
It's not designed to be audited at this stage.
It's designed for self improvement of the producer.
Dr. Keenliside says, if American processors are calling for some sort of welfare certification program for their pigs, it might be necessary for the Canadian industry to have welfare certification that meets their standards to cover pigs that move south for slaughter.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council |
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| Keywords: animal welfare, food safety, CQA, Canadian Quality Assurance |
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2003 |
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