By Bruce Cochrane
The chair of the Canadian Pork Council's Animal Care Technical Group expects a revised Animal Care Assessment component of Canadian Quality Assurance to be unveiled in 2017.
The Canadian Pork Council's Animal Care Technical Group, a team made up of pork producers, veterinarians, research professionals and technical experts from across Canada, is in the process of incorporating Canada's revised Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs into the Animal Care Assessment component of the Canadian Quality Assurance Program.
Animal Care Technical Group chair Dickson Gould says the development of the revised Animal Care Assessment program is major undertaking requiring a lot of diligent evaluation to ensure each requirement is assessed individually and objectively.
Dickson Gould-Canadian Pork Council:
The Pig Code of Practice revision was completed in the spring of 2014.
Compared to the previous Code of Practice there have some changes.
However many of these new requirements are already being carried out on most farms.
The development of the revised animal care assessment, we started in the fall of 2014, and really what it is a verification of the quality care that Canadian producers provide to their operation.
I think one of the strengths of the code is that it's been developed in a way that it will be easy to read, understand, accessible to producers when it comes to implementing on a farm.
Many of the aspects of the aspects of the Code of Practice were already touched upon in the previous CQA program even though it was through recommendations and informational sections but this new program will be pretty impressive for the producers once they get a chance to touch and feel it.
Gould expects the revised animal care program to come out in 2017, but only after a comprehensive pilot project has been completed on farm to ensure all the kinks have been worked out and that it's totally functional.
Source: Farmscape