Meat + Poultry - June 2010 - 91

From the Corral
BY DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN
meatpoultry@sosland.com

Room for improvement
Slaughter inspection and enforcement needs attention
The recent Government Accountability Office's report on humane
slaughter enforcement confi rms observations that humane slaughter
enforcement is very inconsistent.
While the inspector at
one plant might be very
strict, enforcement at
another plant may very
well be lax.
I have observed that
very small plants are
usually more variable
in humane slaughter
Grandin
practices than the larger
plants. Over the years, I have visited
small plants that were either excellent
or awful. This may be due to the attitude of the owner. In a very small
plant, the owner would have a greater
impact on operations. The GAO report also indicated that inconsistency
problems were more severe in small
plants. The report made it clear that
inspectors need more training in humane-slaughter enforcement. A random sampling of inspectors in charge
at 257 federally inspected slaughter
plants indicated that 45 percent of
the inspectors reported needing more
training in determining insensibility,
while 60 percent wanted additional
training in electric prod use.
The inspectors were also provided
with examples of handling and stunning problems and asked to state their

regulatory action. Electric prodding
of an animal in the rectal area is an
act of abuse according to the American Meat Institute guidelines. The
responses from the inspectors are in
Table 1. The reliability of the data in
the GAO report is high because 93
percent of the inspectors responded.

pig with a paddle becomes beating
it. The only way to effectively train
inspectors would be to have a video that shows both tapping, which
is acceptable, and beating, which is
egregious abuse.
There is plenty of undercover footage that could be used for the beating
video. Beating footage could also be
obtained by having people hit cardboard boxes and then have a panel
of experts determine when tapping
becomes beating. Another big problem area is determining insensibility.
Some inspectors still mistakenly use kicking as an indicator of a
sensible animal. This is wrong. An
animal can still kick after the head
is removed. A pinprick to the nose
is an excellent way to determine insensibility. One inspector was so
misinformed recently that he wanted to penalize a plant for egregious
animal abuse for poking insensible
and unconscious pigs on the nose.
The plant was doing this to ensure
they were insensible before they were
scalded. More training is obviously
needed. ■

Better training needed
The recent directive on the use of
numerical scoring for the Humane
Slaughter Act enforcement is a positive step. Numerical scoring using

While the inspector
at one plant might
be very strict,
enforcement at
another plant may
very well be lax.
the AMI guideline criteria will reduce subjectivity. However, the inspectors will still need guidance on
appropriate enforcement actions.
The most troublesome area is defi ning egregious acts of abuse where
a plant is forced to shut down and
inspection is suspended. This is
where clearer guidance is needed.
One problem area is determining
what constitutes beating an animal. One plant was shut down after
an argument about when tapping a

Dr. Temple Grandin operates Grandin Livestock
Systems Inc., Fort Collins, Colo., and is a faculty
member in the animal science department at
Colorado State Univ.
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Table 1.

Enforcement action for electric prodding
of animals in the rectal area
Enforcement Action

Suspension . . . . . . . .
Regulatory Control Action
Noncompliance Report . .
None of the above . . . .
Don't know . . . . . . . .
92 * Meat&Poultry * June 2010 * www.MeatPoultry.com

Percentage of Inspectors

.
.
.
.
.

32%
35%
23%
7%
3%

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Meat + Poultry - June 2010

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