Any Pig Code of Practice Changes Must be Science Based and Actually Improve Animal Care

The Executive Director of the Canadian Pork Council suggests it's important to ensure any changes to Canada's pig code of practice are science based and actually improve animal care.Canada's Code of Practice for the care and handling of pigs was last updated in 2014, the biggest change being the shift to group sow housing, it was then reviewed in 2019 and the next update is set for 2025.

Canadian Pork Council Executive Director Stephen Heckbert told those in Saskatoon last week for Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2024, the main priority is the long-term economic viability of the sector and the best way to ensure that is no surprises.

Quote-Stephen Heckbert-Canadian Pork Council:

We're trying to make sure that if there's infrastructure changes that would be required that we take a good long hard look at "is that something that producers can invest in over time? Would we look at any future changes be grandfathered?" But, for the main part our goal is any changes that are coming, we want to make sure they are going to keep producers competitive, going to make sure producers have long term viability and also actually deliver.

One of the things that I will tell you is sometimes you hear from welfare groups but there's no science behind it so we want this to be a science-based decision that will actually improve animal care.We're not going to just accept someone who says "we think this will improve animal care."You've got to prove it to us and I'll use tail docking as an example.

The challenge is if you don't dock tails, pigs can sometimes bite each other's tails which means that now there's blood in the pen, there's blood around and now suddenly you have pigs getting more aggressive.It's not good for the animals, so there's consequences to doing certain things.It's important for us to recognize that it's easy to say “this is not the right practice” if you're not actually a pork producer.

So, from our perspective, it's about making sure we've listened to the science and we've heard from producers about what's the right thing to do for them.

Heckbert encourages pork producers who have any questions or comments related to the update to reach out to their provincial pork organizations or to the Canadian Pork Council.