By Bruce Cochrane
The associate executive director of the Canadian Pork Council says the response to Canada's updated Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs has been extremely positive.
The Canadian Pork Council is updating the Canadian Quality Assurance program, the Canadian pork industry's on farm food safety program, including incorporating Canada's revised Pig Code of Practice into the Animal Care Assessment component of the program.
Canadian Pork Council associate executive director Catherine Scovil says, since its release in March, there has been a very positive response to the new pig code and a recognition that it sets the industry in a really solid direction for the future.
Catherine Scovil-Canadian Pork Council:
To date the response has been very positive from all segments of the food chain as well as society at large.
I think there's a recognition that this was a difficult code.
We were tackling some tough issues and yet the group found a way to work through it.
They found a way to put together a code that's good for the animals, workable for producers and meeting the expectations of society.
Together codes and assessment really are a uniquely Canadian approach to addressing welfare and it's an approach that gives producers a really solid and credible means to demonstrate how they're taking care of their animals.
We as the Canadian Pork Council are going to roll the code requirements and assessment into our CQA program into a really solid and foundational program for producers that has value both for them as individual producers and as the industry on a whole.
Scovil says the focus over the next 12 months will be updating the CQA program's content followed by testing of the program with a targeted release in January 2016.
Source: Farmscape