Changes to Canada's Health of Animals Regulation Expected to Further Improve Swine Traceability

By Bruce Cochrane

The manager of PigTrace Canada says changes to Canada's Health of Animals Regulation, anticipated in 2017, will further improve traceability for swine.

PigTrace Canada is an initiative created by the Canadian Pork Council and its provincial member organizations to facilitate rapid traceback of any issue, whether it's a food safety issue or animal health issue involving pigs, to address that issue as quickly as possible.

PigTrace Canada manager Jeff Clark notes the 3 main components of traceability are nationally standardized premises identification, animal identification, which for pigs includes ear tags and shoulder slap tattoos or ear tattoos for export, and movement reporting any time pigs are shipped or received.

Jeff Clark-PigTrace Canada:
Prior to July 1, 2014 pigs were not part of the part 15 of the animal health regulation which mandates animal identification and traceability so the regulation was changed in a big way just to bring pigs into the fold.

There is another amendment coming to part 15 targeted mostly at cattle and sheep and some other species for movement reporting but that gives pigs another opportunity to kind of tweak the regulation as it exists now and government expects that regulation to come into effect in early 2017.

Time lines are still too early to really know.
On the pig side we definitely have some things we've learned that we want to change in the regulation and, in fact, some of it is things that we already knew before that government just wouldn't agree with us on so there's still some things we want to change to make this program much more practical and effective for our industry.

Clarke says going into the program the Canadian Pork Council and its provincial member organizations estimated there were about 8,000 pig premises across Canada.

Source: Farmscape