Meat + Poultry - February 2009 - 67

FROM THE CORRAL

Getting comfortable with cameras
By Dr. Temple Grandin
meatpoultry@sosland.com

Photo courtesy of Arrowsight Inc.

ive beef and veal plants in North
America are now being audited
over the Internet by third-party
auditors. These systems are much more
effective than closed circuit TV cameras that plant managers often never
have time to look at. Remote video
auditing is being done by the Arrowsight Corporation in Huntsville, Ala.,
and the American Humane Association, Denver, Colo.
AHA certifies farms as American Humane Certified. Three companies that are
willing to go public about their use of
video auditing are Delimax Veal in Canada, American Beef Packers (formerly the
Hallmark-Westland plant, now under new
ownership), and FPL Foods in Georgia.
There are many other companies that will
be installing cameras in 2009.
Recently I had the opportunity to visit
both Arrowsight and AHA to see how their
auditors monitor the plants. Both systems
have multiple cameras and the following
parts of the plant can be viewed. They
are truck unloading, crowd pen, single file
chute, stun box, and bleed rail for scoring insensibility. In all five plants, I could
watch stunning easily and doing the AMI
stunning audit was easy.
The unloading ramp was also easy
to view and slips and falls would have
been easy to see. At one of the plants,
the camera was set up perfectly and it
was easy to do an electric prod score
audit. In another plant, the camera
needed to be moved. Some plants have
the system set up for vocalization scoring while others do not.
Arrowsight provides the most intensive monitoring service. Several times a
day, an auditor tunes in to each plant and
scores about 20 animals. The times that
the plants are watched are varied throughout the day. If the auditor sees something
wrong, the plant manager receives an immediate e-mail. I watched all five of the
plants for about 20 minutes each and everything was working perfectly.

Artificial intelligence
Arrowsight's program is the most
comprehensive because people actually do the AMI animal welfare audit,
compile the data, and send it to the
plants. The AHA system is simpler and
is designed to be more affordable for
smaller companies and farms. Their
program is designed to catch welfare
violations rather than doing continuous numerical scoring.
AHA has found that artificial intelligence software works well for detecting problems on chicken farms.
Watching a chicken farm on video is
really boring. Most of the day, nothing happens and then a person comes
in to check the chickens.
The computer program can be
trained to ignore this. This is the same
kind of software that might be used to
protect an oil well from intruders. The
program can be trained to ignore the
pump jack going up and down, but it
will alert the operator when other types
of movement are seen by the camera.
A human being still has to determine
if a person triggered the program or an
animal walked up to the oil well.
It is easy to train these programs
to detect repeated rapid movement.
This is the type of movement that
often occurs when people beat aniwww.MEATPOULTRY.com

mals or shoot an animal repeatedly
with a broken stunner. At one of the
chicken farms, the program caught a
teenage girl who was annoyed that
she had to work on her parent's farm
on Sunday. She roughly shoved chickens away from her.
Artificial intelligence is not going to
replace live auditors watching. A person
still has to go back and view the footage
to determine what triggered the program. It also requires a skilled computer
specialist to train the program.
For video auditing of a complex
operation such as a slaughter plant,
the gold standard will be real people doing the actual AMI numerically
scored audit over the internet. The artificial intelligence option is more appropriate for farms and the monthly
fees are much lower.
Some people are worried that the
secure Web site might be hacked.
My response is, "so what?" Whoever
hacked it will be treated to video footage of good plant operations.
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.
We would like to hear from you - to comment on
this story or to request reprints, contact us by
e-mail at: meatpoultry@sosland.com.
I

February 2009

MEAT&POULTRY

http://www.MEATPOULTRY.com

Meat + Poultry - February 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meat + Poultry - February 2009