Meat+Poultry - April 2017 - 106

FROM THE CORRAL

All eyes on ISO
After four years of work, the
International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) has published
an introductory document based on
the World Organization for Animal
Health (OIE) published welfare
standards for slaughter transport and
production of beef, dairy and broiler
chickens. This document is a guide
for developing an animal welfare
plan. The main guidance document
is Chapter 7.1 Article 7.1.4 of the
OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Code.
This contains 11 General Principles
of Animal Welfare. Fortunately, the
document encourages the use of
animal-based measures where the
threshold values are based on peerreviewed scientific literature. For
slaughter and handling, there is now
extensive peer-reviewed literature
that supports the thresholds for
stunning, electric prod use, falling
and vocalization that are found in
the North American Meat Institute
(NAMI) guidelines.
The booklet is titled, "Animal
Welfare Management - General
Requirements and Guidance for
Organizations in the Food Chain ISO/
TS 34700." It is an outline on how to
set up your program, but unfortunately,
it does not provide much practical

guidance. It would be comparable
to how each slaughter plant had to
develop individual Hazard Analysis and
Critical Control Point plans. They had
to figure it out for themselves.
In the section titled, "Developing
an Animal Welfare Plan," it discusses
how to do a gap analysis of your plan.
The directions are complicated and I
will try to simplify them. A gap analysis
is a method for looking at current
performance and comparing it to a
future performance goal. Your gap
analysis should clearly identify your
objectives for animal welfare (see chart
for example).
You would also explain the
corrective actions you used to improve
scores and reduce the gap between
actual scores and the goals. A possible
example for improving stunning
would be including the balancer for a
heavy pneumatic stunner as part of an
enhanced maintenance program. To
reduce falling you might replace the
worn out rubber mat in the stun box.
Another area where welfare could
be improved is the condition of the
animals that enter the plant. Some of
threshold-based, animal-based outcome
measures are percentages of animals
that are non-ambulatory; have poor
body condition score; show evidence
of them being lame, dirty or injured.
You could use the NAMI lameness
scoring system for assessing lameness.
There are also readily available body
condition scoring charts for assessing

the body condition of cull cows and
sows. For the gap analysis, you could
compare your baseline scores against
goals for the future. Some of these
goals could be based on published
literature. There are many papers
published in the peered reviewed
literature in the Journal of Animal
Science and the Journal of Dairy
Science. You can easily search National
Beef Quality Audit and other scientific
papers on Google Scholar. The ISO
guideline requires periodic review of
your animal welfare plan. During this
review, you can determine if you are
closing the gap between your current
performance and your goals.
T E M P L E G R A N D I N | m e a t p o u l t r y @ s o s l a n d .c o m

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW
PLANT QUALITY ASSURANCE
MANAGERS COULD CREATE A
GAP ANALYSIS FROM THEIR
OWN RECORDS:
ACTUAL AVERAGE SCORES
Stunning
Electric Prods
Falling
Vocalization

96%
23%
1%
7%

FUTURE GOALS
Stunning
Electric Prods
Falling
Vocalization

99%
15%
0.2%
3%

The ISO guideline requires periodic
review of your animal welfare plan.
Rosalie Winard

106

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