By Bruce Cochrane
The president of Bock Industries reports a new device for euthanizing compromised piglets provides a range of advantages over conventional methods.
The Zephyr E, manufactured by Philipsburg, Pennsylvania based Bock Industries, is a non-penetrating captive bolt device developed at the University of Guelph to deliver pain and stress free euthanasia to piglets.
In tests conducted on behalf of Swine Innovation Porc and the National Pork Board the device was shown to be 100 percent effective in euthanizing compromised piglets up to 20 pounds.
Bock Industries President Randall Bock says the device is more reliable and more consistent than the alternatives.
Randall Bock-Bock Industries:
Other methods that are in place today are historical in nature and generally it's an instrument that's powered by a human, perhaps a human swinging a blunt object or in some cases a human swinging the pig.
Now, as you can imagine and maybe have seen, the visual impact of this can be quite stunning and can be misinterpreted in that although human direct interaction euthanizing piglets can be effective, there is an aspect of consistency that may be from operator to operator.
There's sort of the operator consistency.
It does require more human strength to do it manually.
With the Zephyr E it takes these out of the equation.
The device is functionally engineered to work.
It doesn't have to be a large operator, it can be a small operator and so a lot of the decisions about how much energy needs to be transferred is all taken care of in the engineering of the device.
This relieves the operator and the owners, producers of having one extra thing to consider as far consistency and reliability.
Source: Farmscape