Canadian Pig Code of Practice Reflects Producers' High Standard of Animal Care

By Bruce Cochrane

The chair of the Canadian Pork Council's Animal Care Technical Group says Canada's revised Pig Code of Practice is a verification of the high standards of care Canadian pork producers provide their animals.

The revision of Canada's Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs was completed in the spring of 2014.

The Canadian Pork Council's Animal Care Technical Group is in the process of incorporating the revised code into the Animal Care Assessment component of the Canadian Quality Assurance Program.

Animal Care Technical Group chair Dickson Gould says the Pig Code of Practice is a transparent reflection of the high standards that Canadian pork producers provide to their animals.

Dickson Gould-Canadian Pork Council:
I think it's a verification process of the high animal welfare standards that Canadian producers provide their animals and a documented process of what was going on.

I think it's important that the Canadian pork industry is also demonstrating our commitment to best practices that are scientifically driven and also meeting the assessment of society changes.

The development of the revised Animal Care Assessment, basically we started in the fall of 2014.

It's a fairly major undertaking and there's a lot of diligent evaluation of the process to ensure that each requirement are assessed individually and objectively.

Our expectation is that the launch of this revised Animal Care Program is probably going to be coming out in 2017 but only after we've done a comprehensive pilot project that has been completed on farm to make sure that we have all the kinks worked out of it and that it's totally functional.

Gould says the program is a verification of the high standards Canadian pork producers provide their animals and it's an educational continuous improvement program.

Source: Farmscape