Well thank you so much for having me here today and that my title slides up there right now, but my next slide shows something really strange and the reason why I'm putting this slide in here is I want to get you to be better observers. What you're seeing in this slide are eclipse shadows. We had a almost a total eclipse on our.
Campus at Colorado State, and that is on the sidewalk in front of our library. The eclipse will act as pinhole cameras through the trees. Now I noticed these weird shadows.
I didn't know eclipses made weird shadows. Other students just walked over this, and the reason why I'm putting this in is I want to get people to understand you've got to be a better observer. What is your animal looking at?
What is it? Where are its ears pointing? Watch where its ears are pointing.
Animals point their ears towards things that concern them. I call that ear radar. I want you to really work on observation.
Now my next slide shows a really cute picture of a guy laying on a pet steer, and the point I want to get across. Is a calm animal is much easier to handle and if cattle get all excited and scared, it takes 20 to 30 minutes to calm back down. So the secret is don't get them excited in the first place.
The next slide was a picture I took in Mexico, and they were roping a steer. And I don't recommend that in the UK, but the reason I wanted to show that slide is that's an example of a horse getting really scared because that saddle suddenly fell off. One of the things that can really frighten animals is sudden novelty.
I remember in one of my early jobs when I was in graduate school, I worked in our dairy, and one day somebody hung a great big yellow raincoat up in the milking parlour, and the cows refused to come in. See something novel could be scary. I talked to a rancher who had a hot air balloon land in the middle of his pasture of cattle that he'd worked really hard to have good low stress stockmanship, and they scattered.
Sudden novelty shoved into an animal's face is really scary. I this explains when people say to you, Well, I took my my heifer to the show to show her, and she went crazy, but she was fine at home. But there's lots of new things at the show such as flags, bikes, baby strollers, and balloons that are not at the farm.
The next slide's just a checklist of behavioural signs that your cattle are getting fearful, and yes, fearful is a correct scientific word. The word fear has been used in the neuroscience literature for decades. One of the big problems we have in science is that people just read their own journals.
They kind of stay in their own silos. Well, what's a sign that a cow's getting a little upset? Heads up, ears alert.
Ears may be pinned back, but if she starts pooping, that's because you scared the poop out of her. And when that tail starts to switch, just switching back and forth, that's a sign that the cow might be getting ready to kick. And when you see the whites of their eyes, that's when they get, they really get scared.
Now in the whole steam breed, sometimes a certain amount of eye white shows anyway. It's just the way their eye is made. But when the eye white is really showing out, showing up and the eyes are just bugging out, your animal is really, really scared.
You don't want to let them get to that point. Now in the next series of slides, I'm going to show you things that make cattle flock and refuse to move through facilities. So this next slide shows some animals headed straight into the sun and they're being moved into a head gate for vaccinations or head veil.
And so lighting has a big effect on how easily animals will move through a cattle handling facility. I have found that I can add a light to a facility, move a light, get rid of a reflection on the ground, and they're going to go in much more easily. Now my next slide is kind of a cow's eye view that I took right at the entrance to a single file shoot.
And you can see a car through the fence. Reflections on vehicles parked along the fence. They can often be a problem.
Other things are shadows, a hose laying on the floor, and your lead animal may come up to that hose. You've got to give that lead animal the opportunity to put her head down and take a look. Don't be pushing her while she's looking.
So in the milking parlour, the new one heifer's going to stop at a hose or a shadow, the experienced cow is going to walk over it because she's learned that it's not going to hurt her. My next slide shows a chain hanging down in a chute or race. I've been doing these talks for over 40 years, so why do I still have to keep talking about chains hanging down in chutes or races?
Because people are not removing them. I often get asked, are animals afraid of getting slaughtered? Well, I've been in 3 different abattoirs.
We a paper towel hanging over out of a dispenser, just moving a little bit near the entrance to the stun box made the cattle just stop. My next slide shows what I call the dark movie theatre effect. It's a bright sunny day outside and inside the veterinary facility it's dark.
Now this facility would work really, really well at night if I simply just light it up with lights. But that's not going to work really well on a really bright sunny day. What I've got to do on a bright sunny day to help make this work is get light into the building.
So my next slide shows some light translucent panels put on the sidewall so approaching animals can see light through the building. That will help you a whole lot. Now my next slide Shows a big puddle in a gate.
Now, I'd rather puddle not be there, but I can't get rid of all the puddles. You've got to give that lead animal the opportunity, put their head down, look at the puddle, and wait for her head to come back up. Ron Gill at Texas A&M University, he kind of has like they got to get in the neutral gear.
If the head's up, they don't want to go, and if the head's down looking at a distraction, they're not going to want to go. Wait until the head gets into the neutral position. And I have a diagram of this in my book Temple Grandin's Guide to Working with Farm Animals on the Amazon website.
It's available electronically, and I've got a diagram in there of the position of the head. Don't push them when it's up and don't try to push them and move them when the head's down looking at the ground. My next slide just shows some animals coming up to a single file race and there's a backstop gate.
Backstop gates will often cause animals to baulk and refuse to move. You might want to equip that with a remote control rope so you can hold it open for the animals or just get rid. Of it and replace it with a sliding door.
The next slide shows a small group of animals being brought up into a facility. Now I know that today a lot of people are dairy people and you might say, why are you showing beef stuff? Well, these handling principles are the same whether it's dairy or beef.
And when you're bringing up, let's say you're working with, you know, year length heifers and you're bringing them up to just put them through the raceway for vaccinations or some other test, bring up small groups. Now my next slide is kind of a joke slide of two dogs walking each other because the good handling, bringing up those small groups, that's going to require more walking. This is a constant battle.
They want to bring up a bigger group so they don't have to walk as much. The next slide shows a green crowd pen. And the crowding area that leads up to a single file, fill it half full.
Don't jam it full of cattle. Another thing you want to do is use following behaviour. If you wait until there's some space in your single file race, then bring the cattle in.
They can just go into the race. If you put cattle in the crowd pen when the crowd when the race is full, they'll just turn around on you. Cattle have a natural behaviour, to want to go back to where they come from.
My next slide shows the flight zone of a whole flock of sheep, and you can see how that flight zone is like a bubble. And I, and the and the sheep are moving around just on the edge of the flight zone. Now my next slide shows kind of the bubble principle of cattle filing very nicely out of gate.
So it's sort of almost like a force field, and if you can stand in the right place, the cattle will just flow around you. The next slide is my flight zone diagram. Now this diagrams in Temple Grandin's guide to working with farm animals.
It's also available free on Grandin.com, my website. Now the curved dotted line that that shows a single file shoot, and the big mistake that people make is they stay out of the head and poke the butt.
That is just not going to work. You want it to go forward. You've got to get behind the point of balance at the shoulder.
Now there's kind of two zones around the animal unless it's a completely tame animal and trained to lead. You've got the flight zone where you enter the flight zone and they move away. Then you've got a zone where they know you're there.
Some people call it the pressure zone or the zone of awareness. So the next slide kind of demonstrates the three zones. When I entered the flight zone, the Black Angus cattle moved away, but there's a tan animal laying down, but he's looking at me.
No, he didn't, didn't figure he didn't have to get up, but he's looking at me. And then you've got some cattle eating at the feed trough and they don't even know I'm there. So it's kind of three zones and the flights only move away, then there's a zone where they're going to turn around and look at you.
They know you're there. They want to look at you, and then there's a zone where they're eating. The next slide shows a really handy movement pattern for getting an animal to go forward in a single file race.
This also works in pens. It's sort of counterintuitive. You quickly walk back by them in the same, in the opposite direction of where you want them to go, and when you quickly walk back past the point of balance, the animals are going to move forward.
Sounds sounds counterintuitive, but just try it. It works. If you walk too slowly, they'll kind of just get lazy and back up on you.
You've got to go inside the flight zone just kind of quick. Just try it out. My next slide shows a raceway that's got a solid outer fence, so the animals don't see vehicles, other distractions outside the fence, and an open inner fence.
Now, if you have an open fence and the animals have got some flights on, you've got to stay away from it until it's time. To move them. Just think about that force field coming out through that fence.
The next slide shows why you need that solid outer fence, because animals coming up this single file race can see the truck loading, and that's just an example of the kind of distractions that are going to give you trouble. The next slide shows an animal rearing in a single file race. If an animal rears, it wants to get away.
What you need to do is back up, back up, and remove yourself from the flight zone. The next slide asks the question, how long should I make a single file raceway, you know, going into a veterinary facility. I want to make it long enough so I can get some following behaviour, but I don't want it so long the cattle are going to get in trouble by standing there for too long.
There's something that's only 1 or 2 cows long, I can't get the following behaviour. If it's, you know, 5 or 6 cows long, I can get some following behaviour. So when I bring the animals into the crowd pen, I can just keep them going and not give them a chance to turn around.
The next slide shows a place where a solid side really helps you because when you're running the squeeze shoe, you're restraining the animal, you've got to stand close. So you might want to try putting a piece of cardboard on the back half of the of the crush. We call it the squeeze shoe, the crush you call it, so that as they come in, they don't see you.
Experiment with cardboard. You need to experiment with materials that are stiff. Don't use flapping stuff that's going to flap.
That will scare them. Next slide just shows the stress reduced with good handling. It's a project done in Brazil.
They've got a lot of young graduate students really working hard on stuff, and when you, it's really important not to yell at cattle, not to be waving your arms. One of the reasons why yelling is bad is because it has intent. The animals know you're mad at them.
And get electric prods out of your hand. They are never, ever, ever your main driving tool. The next slide asks the question Should I have open sides or solid sides?
And I'm If you have open sides, you've got to keep away from it until it's time to move them. One of the things that's happened in the US in the beef cattle is we've had 20 years of selecting for temperament. The cattle that we had 20 years or much 20 years ago were a whole lot wilder, and I think you needed the solid sides a whole lot more.
What a lot of people are doing now is putting solid sides on the crowd pan and a solid outer perimeter, so they don't see things like vehicles. You got really wild cattle, then you definitely need to have solid sides. The other thing is less skilled people.
One of the problems you've got big feed yards is you've got a lot of employee turnover. Now this next slide just shows some like curved facilities. I can't emphasise enough in handling facility design, the importance of laying things out correctly, and that's shown in the next series of slides.
Also, that round crowd pen is in a full half circle, so I take advantage of that natural behaviour to go back to where they come from. The next slide shows the right and the wrong way to lay it out. The number one bad mistake is bending your raceway too sharply where it joins the crowd pen.
That is not going to work. The next slide just shows a simple round crowd pen design, but instead of having all those catwalks, and I'm finding at the age of 71, I don't like getting on and off the catwalks. And it works really well if you stand right in that little cross-hatched area, put the crowd gate on the first notch and just take a little flag, and the cattle will just come right on around you.
The next slide shows another system where I'm working at the pivot point of the crowd gate again solid on the outer perimeter. The next slide shows the bud box. Now that's an example of a design that's very, very simple and economical.
If you have to move portable panels around between pastures, it's really easy to set up, but it's a lot more skill dependent because you're inside the box with the cattle. You absolutely cannot overload this. What you put in the box has to fit in the lead up.
So if your lead up only holds 4 cows, then 4 is all you put in there. So this is an example of something simple to build but much more skill dependent, and if you don't know what you're doing, it's not going to be as safe. We're going to be talking later on about, you know, trade-offs in design.
The next slide shows a man with a little flag. I like the little flags. Now there's some people teaching low stress handling that suggests you should have no driving aid, and one of the reasons for this suggestion is people just can't stop waving them all around.
What you want to try to do is use very small movements of your body to get the animals, to move and not be screaming and not be flapping your arms. This is a study that was done in the US on large ranches in California on my next slide. When they used electric prods, you had more falling, you had more stumbling, you had more vocalisation.
I mean, handling is just pretty terrible. The next slide shows some more curved shoots with all solid sides. One of them is at an abattoir.
And the next slide discusses the concept. I can make something very, very simple like the bud box set it up with portable panels. We've got ranchers in Nebraska using that where they're doing a lot of pasture rotation and they can haul that around on a trailer and set it up really easily.
So it's real simple and economical, but requires a lot more stockmanship skill. Or you can use one of my curve designs much, much easier for unskilled people to use, and I think it provides some safety advantages. Now what are some of the important principles of facility design on the next slide, behavioural principles of restraint.
Non-slip flooring. I cannot emphasise enough about the importance of non-slip flooring. It is essential that you have it.
You can have an animal standing maybe on a single animal scale, and you're getting a lot of little rapid slips and it's freaking out and going berserk because it's slipping. If you're using hydraulic restraining equipment, you've got to set the pressure control, so automatically stop. If an animal vocalises when you squeeze it up or put a restraint device on it, you are hurting it.
It is saying ouch. It should not moo or beller or make a sound in direct response of putting its head in the head restrainer or squeezing the body. The next slide shows a really nice rubber woven mat.
I don't think those will be available in the UK, but it's something that a really innovative person made in the US where they come out good non-slip flooring. Another problem you can have with with flooring is that flooring wears out. And, and then falling can gradually increase and you don't realise it.
Now I want to see how good you are at visual thinking. I want you to know I can't see you, but I want you to raise your hand to every or just comment if you notice that that animal coming out was looking at the sunbeam. That animal is looking right at that sunbeam.
That's the kind of stuff I want you to see. I want you to see those kinds of things. The next slide shows cattle handling measurements that were done at big feed yards in the United States.
Now when I first started, the electric produce would have been 500%. 0, it was just absolutely awful. So I developed a system for measuring handling.
I'd like to have electric produce be zero, but 5%, that's a huge advantage compared to what it was before. Vocalisation is only 1 or 2%, and the way you score that vocalisation is putting them into the box, into the restraining device. You poke them with an electric prod and they move.
Yeah, that counts. They move when you. Catch their head, then you count that falling down anywhere in your facility stumbling where they go down on their knees.
You see, you keep track of these things and then I can tell, am I getting better or am I getting worse? It's just like traffic out on the highway. If the police didn't, you know, monitor speeding, can you imagine what the highway would be like?
I mean, the motorway would be just awful. And then miss caught. That might be an animal caught around the waist accidentally or caught across the head, but you measure these things, and we have found that measuring these things can help prevent some of the worst animal welfare issues.
This next slide shows the original data from temperament research that we did over 20 years ago. And when we first did this temperament research, people thought it was crazy. But what we found was that the animals that jump all around when you're restraining them in the crush.
Had lower weight gains. This has been replicated. So there's two things that determine how that animal is going to behave when you handle it.
It's genetics. And it's previous experiences. If it's had previous experiences with good handling, it's going to get calmer.
In fact, I was just looking on the online today on Google Scholar found an abstract for a paper where just you know, repeated handling reduced some of these scores. Now where you're going to see the genetic differences is when sudden novelty comes in. I mean, let's say somebody brought a, you know, brought a really weird raincoat into the milking parlour and the cows reacted, the ones that react the more strongly, you see the genetic differences.
Sudden exposure to novelty. The more flighting animals will have a bigger reaction. The next slide shows the Jack Pantsgap core emotional systems.
This is based in neuroscience. Again, I want to go to cross disciplines. Animals do have emotions, and when an animal is jumping around when you're handling it, that's usually due to fear.
Then you can have anger. Now, mama's going to protect your baby. Then you have separation distress.
You take the calf away from the cow, and they're both getting all upset. Separation distress or panic is a different emotional system in the brain than fear. And one of the situations you get really dangerous when you're working with cattle is a lone animal.
It wants to get back with its buddies. It's got separation stress. You get in with a in a small pen with it, it's likely to run over you.
Then you have the emotion of seek, like for example, in dogs, some Labrador retrievers want to chase the ball all the time, others are lazy and make a good service dog. Then you've got sex, you've got the mother young nurturing and licking. You might have a cow that defends her calf, but she doesn't bother to lick it.
You see, in genetics, controls a lot of these traits. Now imagine these traits on a music mixing board. OK, we'll go to the next slide.
This music mixing board. Imagine seven slots. Genetics sets the setting, but also previous experience sets the setting.
You can have high and low fear cows. You can also have high Sik cows, and there was a study done in New Mexico State University. They called him a go-getter or a laid back, and some cows would just go out and graze a lot of pasture, and others are too lazy to do that.
The next slide warns you, do not overselect for temperament. You over select for any trait, whether it's a behaviour trait, a performance trait. Or just an appearance of trait like in dogs, you will get problems.
You know, we looked at at the mama cows. We found some are much more vigilant. Some will call the calf and vocalise, others don't.
And the next slide shows a beautiful purebred Brahmin. This is a leader animal down in Australia. One of the things they do is they have trained, gentle leader animals.
The next slide with this big blue and pink graph illustrates the point that when I force an animal to do something, I'm going to have a lot more stress compared to letting it voluntarily go through a facility. You know, get animals acclimated to going through a facility, reward them with some feed, make it worth their while to come into the, into the facility. When I first started in dairy, we always fed the cows in the milking parlour.
And then our industry in the US at least stopped doing that. I think it was a gigantic mistake. You know, now in the US they're putting the feedback in and in a lot of places in Europe they've been feeding them in the milking parlour, and I definitely recommend this.
It's very important that the animal's first experience with a new place, a new person, maybe a new herds person. Or a new piece of equipment like a tractor is a good first experience. If that first experience is scary.
They have a hard time getting over that. And we want to acclimate animals to handling procedures. The next slide shows very clearly the value of good stockmanship.
There's both old research and new research that shows that good stockmanship matters, and stockmanship doesn't get enough credit. What I have found is it was easy to sell people some new fancy facility. But getting people to handle those animals properly was harder.
People want the magical new thing. It could be a handling facility. It could be a drug.
It could be a computer or whatever. They want the thing more than they want the management. And when I first started out my career, I thought I could fix everything with the thing.
Well, I've learned you've got to have the management to go with it. The next slide just shows more advantages to good stockmanship that as people work with animals, they got calmer. The next slide asks an important question.
It's got a Black Angus approaching a silver fox. New things are both scary and attractive. New things are attractive.
If the animal can voluntarily approach. There's a really funny video you can look up online. Type in video, cattle and remote controlled car, and the cattle are chasing a remote controlled car, a little tiny toy car around a field.
But new things are scary if you just suddenly shove it in their face. The next slide Explains how animal memories are specific. You want to understand animals get away from language.
Their memories are pictures. Their memories are certain sounds like the sound of one tractor means I'm going to get food. The sound of another piece of equipment may mean I'm going to get chased.
They will make those kind of associations. Well, two studies here on this next on this this word slide show that as the cattle got accustomed to somebody feeding them in a truck. That does not transfer to person on the ground, person in the truck, person on the ground, totally different.
Also, if you train a horse to tolerate a blue and white umbrella, that doesn't transfer to an orange tarp. The next slide is just to remind you that umbrellas and tarps look really, really different. They look completely visually different.
I want you to get away from language. Think about what it's seeing. I knew a horse that was terrified of black cowboy hats because he'd been abused by somebody wearing a black hat.
Or maybe they might get afraid of, you know, veterinary clothing and try wearing something else. The next slide shows a cowboy on a horse, and the point of this picture is I want to emphasise that in the brain of the cattle, a man on a horse is a different thing from a man on the ground, and we've had trouble where they have with cattle that have only been handled on horseback, and then when they meet the first man on foot, the flight zones are 5 times bigger, and that can get really dangerous. So it's important for animals to learn how to do both.
Or you have animals that are used to on foot, but they're not used to vehicles. You need to make sure when you introduce that that vehicle that it's a good first experience. The next slide shows a dog.
I hate dogs around the lead up race. It teaches cattle to kick. Dog they're biting them just teaches them to kick.
The next slide just shows the importance of getting animals used to different vehicles and different people. Animal thinking is specific. I went to a big fancy horse auction and I watched $5 million thoroughbred horses shrieking and whinnying because they had a strange groom hold them.
Nobody had trained them. It's OK to have a strange person hold your lead chain, and they hadn't been trained for that. They also had not been trained to the noise from the loudspeakers.
Let's just go on to the next slide. You manage things that you measure. It prevents bad practises from becoming normal, you know, like a slippery floor that slowly gets worse and you don't realise it.
Now what measuring handling will do, it's not going to make the best stockmanship, but what, what it will do is prevent things from getting really bad. It'll prevent bad from becoming normal. That's one of my sayings.
We've got to prevent bad from becoming normal, and that can happen in handling practises. It can also happen in something like lameness. Lameness can slowly get worse, and you don't realise it unless you're measuring it.
Again, the next slide just shows the animal handling scores, how many run when I handle them, how many fell during hand length or stumbled, how many moved when I caught them, and hopefully none of them get moved with an electric prod. The next slide just shows differences in the behaviours. This is data I took an abattoir between two different steers sets of steers from different producers, and some of them were much more difficult to handle.
The next slide shows how a change in equipment reduced vocalisations and on the first bar on there. The vocalisation score was 8% due to electric prods. This again was at an abattoir at the entrance to the stung box.
I added a light to light up the way because they don't like the dark, and it dropped down to zero because they could drastically reduce the electric produce. The other big tall bar was a head restraint that applied too much pressure. And 23% of the cattle were mooing because his head restraint hurt their necks.
I reduced the pressure on that, and that vocalisation dropped to zero. Sometimes very simple changes can make a difference, like reducing pressure, getting rid of a sharp edge, putting in a non-slip floor, add a light, and you add a light to light up a dark entrance, or you move a light to make a reflection on a wet floor go away. It's amazing.
The next slide. Shows data collected over the years at abattoirs and in 1996, I did a baseline study for the US Department of Agriculture and things were pretty terrible. This is stunning scores.
Only 30% of the out of a big number like 45 plants could stun 95% right on the first shot because the guns were broken. That is management. That was shocking for people to find out that maintenance was a major problem.
Then when I started, you know, auditing for McDonald's, boy, things changed fast. In most cases, it did not involve a lot of fancy new equipment, a lot of simple changes, maintenance, management, supervision, lighting, and non-slip flooring. The next slide talks about hazard analysis critical control points.
This is a principle used in food safety. You've got to figure out what's important to measure. Well, one thing that's very important to measure on Day is lameness, because then you can tell, is it getting worse or is it getting better?
Also, I don't want to look at paperwork. I want to look at directly observable things. Now the next slide just talks about different ways to audit variables in animal welfare.
You know, the trend now is towards an animal-based measure, an outcome measure. If I'm doing a welfare audit, I don't, you don't have to specifically have a certain type of handling facility, but I've got to achieve certain outcomes. I can't have animals falling down, vocalising, electric prods used all over them.
Then you have some practises that are just banned, like dragging a downed animal. And getting away from telling you exactly how to make facilities except for maybe a few things like feeder space. The next slide shows the critical control points for farm animal welfare.
If I'm going to maintain, you know, a decent level, I'm going to do the handling scoring, well, swollen leg joints on dairy cattle, and one of my former students, Wendy Fullweer, did a study, and she found that That if the farm, if the farm manager spent more time fixing the beds and rebedding the cubicles that they had less swollen leg joints just by doing good management, lameness I can measure dirty animals I can measure. Too many skinny cows, I can measure that. If it's an indoor facility, I can measure ammonia levels, heat stress.
In the summertime, cows are breathing with the mouth open, they are too hot. That is scientifically validated. Now, in organic in the US we have a zero use of, you know, a lot of medications.
So we've had some problems with lice being untreated. Now, I've got problems with that. I know European regs are a bit more flexible.
Now, lameness, the next slide is a really good thing to measure because many different problems, that'll be up to you veterinarians to diagnose and treat can cause cows to become lame. That's why lameness or difficulty walking is the critical control point. Because if I'm doing a welfare audit, I don't have to measure all the stuff I've got on this slide because if they have a lot of problems, that the problems will show up in the lameness audit.
The next slide shows good and bad leg confirmation. One problem we've had in Deco is when they just selected for meat traits, they got post legged or they got collapsed ankles. And this became a huge issue and the pigs back in the late 80s turned into a real big problem before they started doing something about it.
The next slide shows a post-legged steer at the show. That is not something to be proud of. And the next slide shows a really awful looking foot on a pig.
Now it does show the pig on a really nice floor, really nice floor, but really, really awful foot. The next slide shows corkscrew foot or crooked claw, that is a defect that worsens with age. We've got to make sure we're not breeding that.
And then I'm just getting finished up and we're going to have plenty of time for questions, and I always like questions because right now I'm talking to a dead phone and I hope you guys are still there. Well, then you have some practises where the next slide shows the disband, like poking sensitive areas with a driving tool, dragging downers. And I have a video on proper use of livestock driving tools and type that title into Google and find it.
And it's used for basically to help people not have the kind of bad dairy, dairy handling that can show up on some of these animal activist videos where somebody's taking a gate rod, beat up the pigs. We've got to make sure that everything that we do, how would it look on video? Because you can't get away from the video cameras today.
Every phone is a video camera. Then you still may need some input measures, water requirements, and space requirements, the welfare quality system has some very nice pictures on dirty waters and assessing waters. It's really good.
So let's say your job, we'll just finish up with this on the next slide. Is to improve animal welfare. Well, I kind of put on, you know, may put it in steps.
The first thing you got to do is you've got to make sure that something is not going on on this dairy that would really look terrible online, either handling abuse or maybe neglected problems. You've got a lot of lameness. You've got a lot of swollen leg joints.
You've got filthy dirty animals. Then you do numerical scoring, numerical scoring for handling, numerical scoring for things like body condition, lameness, swollen leg joints. And highly behaviour needs, that's more of a problem for the pigs and for the laying hen.
And then what's happening now in the field of animal welfare is more and more people are getting interested in is the animal actually having a good time. My very first experience with dairy was when I was 14, and I went away to a boarding school that had a thai stalls where the cows stayed in all winter because it was in New Hampshire and you'd have 2 ft of snow on the ground in the winter time. And I'll never forget when they let those cows out in the spring.
They acted like they were so happy. They were just running and frolicking around like calves, and my last slide shows my website, lots of information on there for free. And my book is Temple Grand's Guide to Working with Farm Animals.
It's available on Amazon, in electronic, hardback, and paper. And now I would like to do some questions. This is always my favourite part of it.
Oh thank you so much, Temple, that was fantastic. So I'm just looking now at our list of questions and comments. Quite a few.
1st, 1st question I'll post first has come in. Brian's asked, when making changes to management and animal handling, what time frame do you find elapses before you see changes in the animals? It's going to take the animals some time to respond.
I mean, if you have, animals have been treated badly, and there'll be some cows or heifers that won't get over it really well. I've, I've seen situations where I've gone to places that are really awful handling and there were certain cattle we. Get rid of because they're kind of so badly traumatised, but you work with your animals, they will start to calm down.
It's not going to be the next day, but you should see a gradual improvement over a period of weeks. It, it should start to show up. The other thing is, is how about people's attitudes towards animals?
There's been a whole lot of work by Paul Hemsworth, more recently, and then Seabrook years ago. That good stockmanship matters and it matters on productivity. And what I have found is it's kind of three ways that people work with animals natural good stock person, you train them, they're going to just stay good.
Then you got some people you got to supervise all the time and unfortunately there's a few people that like to rough them up and probably should not be working with that animal. That's something I've learned over all the years. Excellent.
Thank you very much. As you say, what a shame if you get some animals that have to be, yeah, slaughtered because they'll never come around. Oh yeah, and the ones that are most likely to get traumatised are the ones that are more genetically flighty ones because they get more scared.
I think it's almost like a PTSD in people because they know that in in soldiers, that 20 soldiers all see the same awful thing, experience the same awful thing, they don't all get post-traumatic stress syndrome. Yeah. They, but, but the animal that's more flighty, you take the Arabian horse, if it's abused, it's gonna be a lot more damaged by it than, you know, commoner draught horse doesn't get as scared.
Fantastic. As I say, everyone keep questions coming. Just a couple of comments now, Temple.
Henrietta has written the institutional problem is that there is seldom a direct link between production results and welfare. Hence, I suggested obtaining the data and deploying it in marketing meloxicam for disputing calves. Oh well, OK, on, on, you know, this budding calves hurts.
There's no question about that. you know, these things hurt and there's a whole lot of literature on different pain mitigation methods. I hope everybody here knows how to use Google Scholar.
Google Scholar is wonderful. Also the PubMed database. And the science direct database PubMed, will have the pain relief research, but there's some behaviour research that's missing on that and Google Scholar or Science directly better but there's the abstracts or summaries of the articles are free and you can go on those databases and yes, it hurts and pain mitigation definitely does help.
And, and, a lot of the research shows, you know, using lidocaine or lidocaine, you know, the dead in the horn bud and giving them meloxicam, which is an arthritis drug. You know, we've got to have things that are practical. You know, when I start reading papers about, about farmers are going to use ketamine at a big gigantic cattle feed yard, I'm going, no, I can't have that drug with abuse potential on the place.
Yeah. Thank you, that's excellent. I've made a note of those, resources, as you say.
Thank you for sharing that. Another comment. Please thank, this is from Claire Firth.
Please thank Doctor Grandin for her great ideas. The first slaughterhouse I visited as a vet student in Austria had a curved chute, and the cattle were amazingly calm, with hardly any vocalisations. The manager told us the plant had been built according to Temple Grandin's recommendations.
She has had a positive effect on welfare all over the world. Well thank you so much I really appreciate that feedback. And, and no, thank you so much.
Excellent. Another comment from Henrietta. The problem in the UK is that we as a nation have backed off from thorough welfare auditing of the most demanding animal handling event in every farm animal's life, its journey to slaughter, nor has this nation any discernible initiative to bring in mandatory pre-slaughter stunning as carried out in the Netherlands.
Well, what made the biggest change in the US, I've been in the US industry for 44 years, and when I first started, I made the mistake that a lot of kind of engineering people make. I thought I could build equipment that would sort of self-manage. Well, that's simply not possible.
Then I started training employees, but I had, but then I found I needed to train the managers because the managers have got to get behind doing good handling. Now the thing that made the biggest difference in the US is when I trained McDonald's and Wendy's Corporation to use that simple scoring system and a plant had to make their numbers. If they couldn't shoot 95% on the first shot because of a broken gun, they were kicked off the McDonald's approved supplier list.
It worked like magic. And another reason why it worked was it was very objective. And another thing I did, I did what I call reverse conflict of interest.
We made some shabby old places work, doing a lot of simple changes with lighting and non-slip flooring, moving smaller groups. That was another big factor at the slaughterhouse. They've got to do that more walking, moving those smaller groups, and out of the 75 original beef and pork suppliers, and there was about 45 beef, only 3 of the abattoirs had to build something expensive.
But management's got to get behind doing things right. Mhm. Absolutely.
Thank you for that. Another comment, really enjoying the session. Thank you, Doctor Grandin, and I'm in my happy cattle handling dream, I'd get Doctor Grandin to talk to some of my farmers while I went round and deflated all the tyres of their quad bikes.
Quad bikes cause so much stress in cattle. Well, it depends upon how you use quad bikes. This gets back to the first experience.
If the, if they, if all you do is chase cattle with quad bikes, they're going to be stressful. But I've seen people drive a quad bike out there and the cows are trying to snack off the back of it, and that can get dangerous and you get the quad bike, the quad bike tipped over because you get really tame cattle shoving and pushing. Well, I want to get really tame animals shoving and pushing.
I'm not going to put the feet out until they just back off and just calm down a little bit. It's how you use the quad bike. If it's used wrong, it can be really, really super stressful, and I've seen it go both ways.
You know, at our experiment station when they crank up certain motor, they come running, and they know they're going to get fed. That's all our, our mama cows are all out on pasture. As you said, that association, yeah.
It's association. Now, if you go out there, you chase them all around, there's some cattle that know one quad bike's good, 3's trouble. They'll make that kind of differentiation.
Mhm. Yeah. OK, following on, question from your previous comment when you were mentioning about the, work you did with McDonald's and Wendy's, how do you get management on your side?
Well, what happened, there's a show we have in the US called Undercover Boss. Well, I was hired to take a McDonald's high-level management on their first trips to farms and slaughter plants after McDonald's lost part of the McLibel suit, and you can look that up, and I'll never forget the day when one of their vice presidents saw a half dead emaciated dairy cow go into their product. And he was horrified.
It was just like that show Undercover Boss. His name was Bob Langert. He's now come out with a new book describing the things that we did and And then I started training their food safety auditors to do the really simple scoring system and a couple of plants got booted off the approved supplier list.
Yeah, they got serious because on these big plants that McDonald's contract was a million dollars worth of business every year. And they got serious. And the other thing that made it work is I've bent over backwards to do what I call reverse conflict of interest.
I design equipment and I designed a lot of expensive things and I've bent over backwards to make whatever they had in that plant work. We did a lot of non-slip flooring, unloading ramp, stun box floors, lots of stuff with lights, put solid sides up in the right places, training people, moving smaller groups, supervision. Another thing we've got now is video auditing.
Where auditors over the internet can watch what's going on. I know in the UK they're doing that some now I think in Denmark it's now mandatory because this solves the problem of people acting good when somebody's standing there with a clipboard. Yeah.
Mhm. Excellent. Have you an equivalent in small animals?
That's just a question that's come through. Well, well, one of the things we want to do for dogs and cats is let's give them a non-slip floor to stand on on that on that slippery table. And if you don't want to bother cleaning it, just have the owner bring in a bath mat home with a rubber backing that the puppy is already used to.
Put the puppy on that, and then the owner can take it home and wash it. You don't have to deal with it. But let's just start with those kind of simple things.
Let's make the first trip to the vet's office maybe treats. Now I know you want to get the vaccination into them so they won't get sick. We could bring them back the next day or that afternoon, do the vaccination, but make sure the first experience at the vet's office is a good first experience with things like treats because too many dogs know exactly which route when they go in the car is going to go to the vets and then they're starting to get all all upset.
Yeah, as you say, coming back to association, make it positive as soon as possible, yeah. You want to make it positive because sliding around on the table and maybe getting handled roughly is probably a lot more traumatic to the puppy than than the shot is or the jab as you call it. Brilliant, thank you.
And another, comment come through from Henrietta, who incidentally is also thanking you profusely for your principles that she used working in 10 years as an OVS and POVS at lairages designed and operated to your principles. She's mentioning that one of the biggest challenges in big factories is moving animals towards the noise that you can't quite abate from the dressing areas. That can be a problem.
Another big thing that can really wreck handling an abattoir's air movement, and that can change with the time of day. Go up to the stun box door and hang and let it take a little piece of tissue. And hold it there and if the air is blowing back down the race towards approaching cattle, that will absolutely wreck handling.
Another thing that makes it really difficult to go in is air blowers, and I know you have there for food safety, but they really affect cattle handling. Another common mistake I see at abattoirs, OK, you have a head holder, but now the cattle are looking through the head holder and they're seeing out onto the slaughter hall and they're seeing conveyors and they're seeing people walk by. And what you want to do in that situation is put up a solid barrier about 1 metre in front of that head holder so the cattle see a lighted place to put their head, but they don't get to see all the activity through the head holder.
I don't, I went to some plants in Germany that had that problem. There's a lot of plants that have that problem, and people are just not seeing it. Yeah.
Yeah, comes back to your earlier slides, as you say that solid, yeah, partitions so they can't see the distractions. Well, you see, and you've got to, you've got to show a place to go because I saw a system for pegs where they were handled in groups to go into a stunner, and, and they made a see through wall at the end of the hallway. But in order to prevent them from seeing the activity, they put what I call a false wall.
They put a false wall up about 1.5 in front of that open wall so the patient could see a place to go, and they'd like that area, but they couldn't see people walking by or doors opening and closing or some other thing. Mhm.
Incidentally, that's just answered the last question that's come in. Thank you for that, preempting that. Let's have a look, do do do do.
Do you think smaller abattoirs can be better than larger ones? Both can be good. It gets down to management.
You know, I've been in big abattoirs that are excellent. I've been in small abattoirs that are excellent. I've been in small abattoirs that were horrible, and I've been in big abattoirs that have been horrible.
The most important thing is management. And then the other thing is do not overload equipment. I don't have time now to explain all the different types of equipment for abattoirs, but you can have a situation where it can be happening in a big abattoir.
It can also happen in a small abattoir. Where, where you can't cycle the equipment. Like one of the worst messes we had was an abattoir that did 26 cattle an hour.
It worked really well at that, and they pushed it to 35 cattle an hour and it was a gigantic mess of slamming the doors on the on the cattle and everything else bad, overloaded equipment. That's really, really bad. I've seen situations where with the with a pig, with a group stunning system of forcing pigs on top of other pigs.
But you can get overloaded equipment both in big abattoirs and small abattoirs, and that can be a big mess and expensive to fix. Excellent. Brilliant.
OK. Do do do. Last question coming through or or comments, sorry, best accidental a done by.
Sorry. OK, with, with the solid sided in bracket side opening, but its head and looked out over the lorry park which conferred a false sense of you're just about to let me out, whilst the slaughter man popped out to shoot it in the forehead. Well, what you want to do in a situation like that, I get some big pieces of cardboard, and I would experiment with putting a solid panel up in different places and then you test your concept with cardboard.
I don't want stuff that's going to flap, and then when you figure out where to put it, then I'm going to replace that with metal. Also experiment with portable lights, get down into the stun box, see what they're seeing. A lot of stun boxes now are stainless steel.
They're extremely shiny. And I have found that if I move the lights on the ceiling, I can sometimes make the reflections go away. Now one good thing they're doing in a lot of stun boxes now is they're building the sliding parts out of a real heavy green plastic board, which helps to helps to cut down on noise.
What you've got to watch is, is where exactly does your animal stop, because a calm animal will look right at the distraction that he doesn't like. He'll look right at it. He'll show it to you, show you what it is.
And the person walks by, the cow stops, or they feel the air on their nose or they see a paper towel hanging down. I've been in 3 abattoirs where a paper towel hanging out of a rack right by the stun box entrance was stopping the cattle from going in. It can sometimes be a very small thing.
But when they're calm, they'll show it to you. When they're getting excited and scared, they just come up there and just always turn around really fast or back up really fast. You can't tell what it is.
But when they're calm, they'll point their eyes and ears right towards the distractions. They'll find them for you if you just watch. No, I love that idea, as you say with the cardboard, and Henrietta's just, clarified on that point.
She said, actually, in this instance, it was good because the animal moved forward into the box because it thought it was going to walk out in front, I guess, because it could, could see, and that obviously wasn't something that was pulling off, pulling it off moving. Well, that won't go into a total dead end, you so you, you, you know, it's OK to from the sea. See, he looked through the head holder and see a blank wall that's just, you know, plain colour like white or something like that or tan, a lighted place for the head against a blank wall.
But I have been where the head holder gave him a view of the whole entire slaughter hall. That's terrible. Yeah.
OK, so, so I'll make this the final question, again, an anonymous saying thanks for a great talk, will be, will being moved by a dog always stress cattle, or will they be OK if they're used to it? Well, dogs, border collies and kelpies used really right out in the field where they work on the edge of the flight zone. I've seen beautiful handling with border collies and kelpies, but it's out in the field.
It's not in small pens and it's especially not in a single file race. What I really hate is a blue heeler snapping through the bars at cattle in a single file race. And then it trains them to kick, and then the cattle kick somebody with both back feet really badly.
It's extremely dangerous for people further on down in the supply chains such as livestock markets or meatpacking plants. I've almost had my head kicked off at two different abattoirs, cattle that have been bitten by dogs when they cannot get away in a confined area such as a single file race. Yeah.
Yeah. That's really interesting as you say, yeah, the different context of where they come across those dogs. So I've seen beautiful handling with kelpies in New Zealand, and the kelpie would work right on the edge of the flight zone.
It was absolutely beautiful. And then I've seen a blue heeler and they're biting everything. And it's horrible.
Mhm. Now, I'd like to put the dogs away inside the crows. Mhm.
Yeah. Excellent. Right, well, thank you so much, Temple, for sharing your insights.
There's obviously we're very fortunate they're behind the pioneering approach to improving cattle welfare clearly around the world. So thank you so much for giving me. Thank you very much, and I've been, it's been really great having me.
Let me give you my contact information. My, answering service number is 970. 229-0703.
My email, I get my emails through Cheryl and that's Cheryl C H E R Y L. Got to have a dot Miller, you know, like Millangrain Cheryl dotmilller at colostate C O L O state. It's an abbreviation for Colorado State, Colostate.edu for education.
You can also find that on the Department of Animal Science website at Colorado State University. Got my book Temple Grandin's Guide to Working with Farm Animals, and that's aimed at smaller producers, and Grandin.com's got lots of free information.
Just Grandin.com, my last name, and I just want to thank everybody for being on the webinar. Thank you, Temple.
We'll share all that information to everyone who's been attending live today, and we also know that a lot of people who have registered for the event will look in on demand. So, so yeah, we'll make sure all those details are passed on. So to someone else's question, is it possible to.
Rewatch the webinars again. Absolutely. You're getting lots of thanks coming through Temple Temple.
Thank you for a very informative talk. Wonderful webinar. Thank you so much.
All right, it's been wonderful to talk to you and you've got permission to record it, permission to post online. You have permission to do whatever you want with that done and spread it around, you know, so it's been great to talk to everybody. Thank you, Temple.
OK, thanks very much. Thank you very much. Bye now.
