WCVM Developing Tool to Assist in Making Management Decisions Related to Animal Welfare

Information being collected by the Western College of Veterinary Medicine from pork producers and their veterinarians will be used to create a new tool to assist in making business management decisions related to animal welfare.

The Western College of Veterinary Medicine has launched a study under which pork producers and veterinarians are being interviewed about management decisions that influence animal welfare and how that relates to business sustainability.

Dr. Yolande Seddon, an Associate Professor Swine Welfare and Behavior with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine and the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Swine Welfare, says respondents are being asked about how various aspects of animal management relate to animal welfare, production and other business sustainability goals, including how this impacts staff well being.

Quote-Dr. Yolande Seddon-Western College of Veterinary Medicine:

We are taking the information that we learn from interviews and we are combining it with information that we have already collected from published literature in order to evaluate the relationships between management practices and their impact on animal welfare and how it impacts other business metrics of production and sustainability.

Together this information from the interviews and the literature will be used to develop a decision-making tool that will be used by the industry to understand the relationships between animal management business decisions on animal welfare and how it can impact performance and wider sustainability goals such as environmental impacts.

An additional benefit of these interviews is that it is enabling us to actually capture the first-hand experiences of the industry in managing and making decisions over animal welfare, including a number of things that are quite challenging to put in practice.This is simply not being captured in scientific literature and it's really valuable to hear the industry's side of the story on this because its typically not heard.

Dr. Seddon says the focus is to learn about what producers and their veterinarians are seeing in practice when making management decisions and how it influences the overall business model.