Perspectives on animal care

Observations from Dr. Temple Grandin, Colorado State University.

Dr. Temple Grandin doesn't mince words when it comes to the need for auditable animal care standards.

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," she says. "A good auditing system cannot be vague. I can't stand the words 'adequately,' 'properly' or 'sufficient', because one person's idea of what's proper might be another person's idea of poor handling. In a good auditing system, we want to get away from somebody's opinion of what is good or bad."

Fortunately, years of research have led to many animal care indicators that can be measured objectively, says Grandin, who has formed this and many other observations over a remarkable 25-year career in animal care.

Grandin is a designer of livestock handling facilities and an Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed are located in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. In North America, almost half of the cattle are handled in a center track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. Curved chute and race systems she has designed for cattle are used worldwide and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many people to reduce stress on their animals during handling.

As one who learns best from first-hand observation, Grandin has spent the bulk of her career travelling extensively to livestock handling facilities throughout North America and beyond. Here is a brief sampling of her observations, delivered as part of a presentation at the 2003 Banff Pork Seminar.

Get familiar with the animals

"A simple thing for managing animals is don't get them all stirred up. You've got to get people in the pens and walk around with them. If the first time the pigs have people in the pens is when they're loading up to go to market, you're going to have a squealing mess. In the pen, you train them to just get up and flow around you."

Good manpower essential to animal care

"A key to good stockmanship is you must not understaff a place. A veterinarian several years ago presented a paper saying he's got a really simple audit for big sow farms - 'I count how many sows they've got, then I count how many cars are parked there. If they've only got two cars parked there - I can be pretty sure that they're understaffed.' There's no way that a person can be a good stockman if they're running around like a chicken with its head cut off."

Keep it simple – don't be seduced by the "techno fix"

"When it comes to solving problems, oftentimes people want to buy a thing: a new drug, a new computer, a new program – whatever it is – the instant techno fix. And they'll do that before working on simple management. But most times, it's the simple things that work best. On a simple audit, you have to figure out, what are a relatively few really important things you have to measure that really matter. On a slaughter plant it's a no-brainer that stunning an animal and getting it unconscious is important. For sows in an on-farm situation, important things to measure include body condition, lameness, air quality and other factors – those are simple things you can score on a per animal basis."

A happy pig is a productive pig

"As simple as it may sound, one of the keys to successful stockmanship is actually liking your animals. Dr. Hemsworth down in Australia has found that people who like pigs have more productive pigs. Poorly handling pigs is bad form, it makes the animal's body temperature go up, which is a bad thing to have happen to the meat. One of the improvements they're making at the meat packing plants is they're getting the electric prods out of people's hands and giving them other tools like a little stick with a flag on the end of it. That's much better for moving the pigs."

Attitude is key

"I was very pleased to see at this conference a real emphasis on stockmanship. For one example, in the session on nursery pigs, there were some good discussions about the importance of adjusting feeders correctly. That kind of attitude is really important in training stockmen."

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