Animal welfare in a world concerned with food security

THE symposium was held by CABI, a not-for-profit international organisation that aims to improve people’s lives by providing scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment, to mark its 100th anniversary. It took place at the RVC – London on June 24. The keynote speech was delivered by Temple Grandin of Colorado State University, who described how seeing things from an animal’s perspective could greatly improve animals’ compliance during handling, thereby reducing stress and associated welfare problems. While good equipment made good handling possible, she said ‘The other half of the equation is management.’ She explained that she would rather have adequate equipment with the very best management than the very best state-of-theart equipment but with poor management. One of the most basic principles when handling livestock was to avoid shouting at the animals. ‘A calm animal is easier to handle,’ she said. ‘Don’t get it all scared and excited.’ Once an animal was fearful, it would take about half an hour to calm down; therefore, any measures that could be put in place to avoid startling the animals would be beneficial. Based on her experience of cattle production in the USA, she noted that many of these were not very costly. Installing non-slip flooring was one such measure. ‘Working with slaughter plants, when I start out with a new plant, the first thing I’ve got to do is put steel rods welded on the floor so they don’t slip,’ she said. A vehicle driving by could startle an animal, and contrasts between light and dark caused by shadows, or between different types of flooring material, would make them nervous about moving forwards through a race, or ‘chute’ as they were called in the USA. ‘Pay attention to visual detail that we tend to not pay attention to,’ she said. ‘For some of the earliest work I ever did on animal handling, I got down in the chute to see what the cattle would see.’ Simple solutions, such as blocking out bright sunlight with cardboard or allowing animals time to observe a new flooring material before continuing along the race, would significantly increase compliance. There were also ‘time of day’ effects. For example, moving cattle towards a rising or setting sun was challenging. Animals would resist moving from daylight into a dark building – something she referred to as the ‘dark black hole effect’. ‘Maybe you need to change the time of day that you handle them,’ she said, adding that placing portable lights strategically around the facility and altering building designs to allow more natural light to penetrate were also potential solutions. ‘What I’m trying to get you to do is to be a lot more observant of the things that the animals notice,’ she said. She also recommended looking out for behavioural signs of stress. ‘There’s research now that shows the whites of the eyes will start to show and horses and cattle will tail switch,’ she said. Animals also tended to point their ears towards things that had alarmed them. Dr Grandin had designed livestock handling facilities using observations of the reactions of cattle to human movement and other stimuli. The natural behaviour of cattle to go back to where they had come from had inspired the design of a curved handling facility. ‘It’s really important that these are laid out correctly. If they’re laid out wrong they don’t work,’ she said. For cattle, it needed to be a full half circle. As the cattle came out of the ranch and around the bend, they would think that they were returning to familiar ground. ‘The other advantage of a curved race is that as the cattle come in they don’t see the people standing around doing all the veterinary work,’ she added. ‘They don’t like to approach visible people up ahead.’ Staff should also be trained to understand principles such as an animal’s ‘flight zone’ and ‘point of balance’. She explained that the flight zone was an animal’s personal space, which, once infiltrated by a handler, would cause it to move away. The zone would be smaller when the animal was calm. Point of balance was determined by an animal’s wide-angle vision. An animal would move forward when the handler crossed this point. ‘If you want an animal to go forward, don’t stand in front of it and poke it up the rear,’ she warned. ‘Sometimes if you just quickly walk back by in the opposite direction, they’ll move ahead.’ Another principle of good handling was not to overwork and understaff. There had to be enough workers with the ability to follow the principles she had described. Slower was also faster, she said, in that following procedures and avoiding overcrowding the animals would make things run more smoothly and decrease the likelihood that time would need to be spent calming the animals down. Crowd pens should be ‘passing through’ pens, she said. Only when they were half empty should more animals be allowed in. It was difficult to encourage animal handlers to do this, but, she pointed out: ‘Good livestock handling is going to take more effort.’ ‘I’m a big believer of working on training animals to cooperate with handling procedures,’ she added. The animals that were most likely to react fearfully to new stimuli were those that had led too sheltered a life. ‘New experiences are both scary and attractive,’ she said. Therefore, if an animal was left to explore something new voluntarily, rather than being forced, it was less likely to react to it during a more stressful situation, for example during handling. She called this the ‘novelty effect’. As an example, she said: ‘Pigs differentiate between a person in the pen and a person in the alleyway. If the first time Temple Grandin: ‘What I’m trying to get you to do is to be a lot more observant of the things that the animals notice’ The challenges of maintaining high standards of animal welfare in a world facing increased demand for food production were discussed at a recent symposium in London. Arianwen Morris reports.