OK, thank you, and thank you for inviting my wife and me here to this forum. We don't have things like this very much in North America, so it's exciting to be here for, to have a room full of people who are dedicated to improving the lives of animals of all kinds. So.
For some reason I get to challenge the idea that the UK has the best welfare standards in the world. So work with me here a little bit, . So perhaps, you know, in certain cases, certainly, the regulations are very good, obviously, .
But the questions arise, are there better instances of animal welfare in different farm settings around the world? And I've had the opportunity to be in different farms in different parts of the world in different types of farming, and there are good things and bad things everywhere. An interesting thing is that no matter where we are standing, no matter what farm we're on, everybody is sure that that is the best welfare that there could be.
So everyone wants their animals taken care of well. It doesn't always translate down to the animal level. So the questions will be really are there better standards for specific issues elsewhere than than would be here in the regulations?
Is monitoring of this, particularly in question would be is monitoring of the standards sufficient to for the welfare or the lives of the animals. And do the, do the standards and processes in the UK for instance, allow for improving the facilities and the welfare of animals sufficiently over time. I've been involved with making many welfare standards in North America and and we end up on committees and we and the committees end up having people's biases built into the standards.
In other words, they don't always reflect what the welfare science says or what the biology or physiology of the animals want, as, as Doctor Main said. Before, New Zealand is, is starting to incorporate David Miller's five domains into their welfare standards and assessment programs, and that's that's definitely an improvement over the five freedoms. Farmers often want to know is this the end?
The farmers are usually willing to agree to something, but they want it to stop. They want to know that this is the last improvement they need to do, the last capital investment they need to make the last change, and it's never going to be that way. So the welfare standards have to reflect that, but they have to take into account the ability of farmers to stay in business and to provide the products to the consumers.
Improvement often involves growth in the case of animal welfare. Many of the things we want animals to have in their lives that they don't currently have will involve better facilities. We'll see the the the welfare animals have on farms is a combination of people and facilities.
And in order to move from where they are and their and their lifestyle or their welfare, often we need to remodel the facilities or just build new facilities. And, and with that we get to a kind of a discussion that happens a lot with animal welfare, larger versus small farms of all kinds, pigs, chickens, cattle. All the same discussion.
Large is not always better or worse. Small is not always better or worse. But with large farms we end up with the opportunities to have as farms consolidate a bit and grow a bit, we have the opportunity to gain some welfare advantages and to be innovative.
We also have the responsibility to be more careful because if something goes wrong, more animals are hurt pretty quickly. So again, livestock is a combination of animals and people, facilities and people. People can overcome poor facilities, good facilities make people's actions with animals easier to get to the lives worth living.
At least in the states in North America, Canada, a bit of Mexico. Capital investment drives a lot of what we're talking about because we we've built often welfare programs or farms that don't really allow the welfare animals, particularly in our large poultry and swine farms where we need to rebuild the entire thing is to get rid of gestational stalls and battery cages. There's a little bit of a difference talked about by Doctor Main.
In the US we have, for instance, in Canada also. There are no actual federal regulations regulating the welfare of animals on farms. We have none.
It is, but we do see states because of animal advocates activities in certain states like California, Michigan, Florida, some other states, Ohio. State legislatures will develop specific welfare regulations eliminating gestation stalls, for instance, eliminating battery cages requiring different housing for poultry, and this individual states end up driving federal rules or federal regulations and end up driving consumer. Or retailer actions.
So, so the, the threat that there'll be more and more states adopting the laws ends up driving welfare in our country, and we're seeing a, a bit of a multiplier of that going on. At the bottom of this one is economies of scale can favor good welfare. And that, and that's actually really in this, in the active as this particular part of the economy of scale with labor.
You may or may not realize. I grew up on a small dairy farm in in Southern California in San Diego back when there were cows in San Diego, if you've been there. And and on small farms we find the problem that people are doing multiple tasks and, and, and because of that they don't tend to get very good at any one thing, and things tend to get put off and, and the welfare of animals quite often suffers in our medium sized farms in North America, for instance, because people are just working too hard.
And, and but if you get to a certain size of scale in in in North America it'd be about 1500 cows, then you can start hiring management. And start hiring specific people, people who only feed calves, who only feed the cows, who only milk the cows, and only do certain things. And that can provide a very high levels of welfare to animals.
So very large dairies, for example, large dairies and, and then we have different schemes. We have not regulation by any means in in North America. The Canadians have codes of practice that are wonderful and put together very thoughtfully and over time, but nobody does them.
The farms don't do them. So they're, they're currently in the process of understanding that and going through the procedures to adopt welfare auditing processes for their codes, which are very good, but, but it's a case of the codes are there, but there's an expectation people do it, but they don't do it. When we get to really large farms, the farms have the ability to spend $5000 to $10,000 a year on a on a proper third party welfare audit and and a really good welfare audit, third party private welfare audit requires training programs for everybody doing any tasks.
They're all delineated. The audit goes in, looks at the paperwork, the training, who got trained, when and where, goes out, interviews the the the the workers, the employees. How did you get trained?
Tell me, tell me about it. It better match the protocol. And you can go all the way through it like that.
When done like that, we find that things that disbudding, for instance, is done quite well, a lot better than somebody just spending 5 or 6 in a month, you know, but if they're disbudding, we have we have dairies where people disbud cows all day long. That's an 8 hour a day job. We have people who are vaccinating calves and cows that's an 8 hour a day job.
They get really good at it and if we want to make a change, we can come in and make a change pretty quickly and it's consistent. And, again, on the larger farms, we're saying because of retailer required welfare assessments or or certifications or audits. We're seeing the larger farms in order to maintain their market, and, and maybe expand market share into some niche markets or, or retailers.
That they'll actually have dedicated welfare officers or managers on site, people who are solely responsible like HR, you know, now we're starting to see welfare managers. We in the veterinary world we like them to be veterinarians, but it turns out veterinarians are pretty bad at managing things overall, so and they're really bad at telling people to do things when they don't want to do things. We, we like to please people more than get things done so much.
But we see it on, on, on really, so we do see, I will say we see some really good farms that are providing really good welfare with people who are really interested and have compassion, and we teach it all the way through the system from, from the owner down through the managers and then somebody manages the program, so there's a welfare program and it's managed. That can be done in multiple ways. A veterinary practice or a consultancy of some sort could do it in multiple small farms, provide the management.
It doesn't, it can be multiple ways of doing that. But to, to really get the welfare day to day consistent the way we want for the 5 domain model, it's gonna need somebody who's overseeing the program. And again, I, I've said, quite, quite often we really need some recapitalization put into the system farm of any kind to make it more safe for the animals or expand the facilities and not have overcrowding.
The way that we assess the welfare can be different. In the industry, the government programs in Europe, there's a tendency at least on the continent to sort of ignore the programs and, and have a base level that, that gets accomplished and maybe things don't get assessed as well as they should. If there's a if somebody's paying $10,000 to have a welfare audit, they want a clear cut.
They want a really good report. They want to know what they're doing. The welfare audit then becomes a report on the program.
They have a program. They want the program to succeed and provide the welfare that to the animals so they can maintain their market if nothing else. But they use the audit as a true third party evaluation of the program, and if it's not working in certain areas, and they feed back and fix that.
We're also seeing again on large farms because they have the ability to pay for it. We see third party video monitoring. This might sound a little big brother, but there's a lot of video cameras in the city, but we have video cameras on some dairies, for instance, in the milking parlor in the maternity area in the calf raising facility and the holding pen for the milking parlor out in the in the housing watching people interact with the animals in in the in the housing and the cubicles.
And that's that can be 24 24/7 monitored by third parties in a different city with a report and a phone call if there's an egregious act or a nonconformance by any employee at any time. That's common in large slaughterhouses in the US because of the welfare problems they've had historically, but we're starting to see it bleed over into the farms. just a a list you can see them.
These are the, on a large farm you can attain the ability to, to have these things. Have protocols and have training and specific training and then, and the training, the outcomes of the protocols are can be reviewed and we can feedback how, how did that work for the fresh cows, for the, for the newborn calves, for the whatever we have, the pigs. And each of these will be attended to specifically and in detail in a welfare audit.
Whereas, you know, a standard government or industry-driven programs probably don't really delve down into the, the detail to, to ascertain with confidence that these things are being done for the animals and not just to get a program certification. Some pictures of what can happen with economies of scale. I'm not by any means saying that large farms are the way to go, but there has to be a way to get things done as farms, farms often reach a certain level where people just get overtaxed and worn out trying to do too many things by hand, and mechanization can really help the lives of animals when when when it's done right.
Again, we talked about maternity pens. I was on a dairy in China a few years ago. China has many large dairies, not all of them are very welfare friendly, but some are.
This particular dairy had 3000 heifer calves, in hutches. There are individual hutches, which is a particular problem, but there were no sick calves. I got about halfway through and realized something was really different.
There were no sick calves. They fed every calf individually to to a certain body condition. And everything, nothing got sick.
It was very impressive, so it can be done. Again, here's a very large calf branch. There's a former student in this room who may have been at that calf ran, in California, they have 60,000 head of calves, 1 to 4 months old.
70% of the calves never get a drop of lostrom, back when we took this picture, and they had a 2 to 3% mortality rate because. We have the economy of scale. This place, these large farms make their own milk replacer.
We target the milk replacer to the 11 day to 7 days old, 7 days to 14 days old. Each, each group can get a specific milk replacer targeted to their nutritional needs for that week. So there's some advantages that can occur.
It doesn't mean they do occur. The ability for farms of any type to be in competition or at least be creative needs to be allowed in any welfare scheme. We're starting to see slowly and with reluctance in many cases, we're starting to see group housing of calves on dairies.
. There's there are 4 10,000 cow dairies, 10,000 milking cow dairies on this site feeding into one single heifer calf ranch, so there's a lot of heifer calves there. Again, they're running a less than 2% mortality rate, and for the last 5 years they've had paired calf housing. Of yes, there are Jersey calves that are performing quite well.
So we can see it when it's done well, the large farms perform very well. When it's done poorly, then, then of course, large farms are a higher risk of of having problems for more more cows or more pigs in a short period of time. Another thing that happens.
That I found kind of interesting wandering around and doing welfare audits and different dairy assessments and different kinds is. Larger farms and, and, and I, I have to admit I'm not. Familiar with the details of, of environmental management here.
But at least in North America, small farms are exempt from the mineral management or environmental management programs. And interestingly, in Western Pennsylvania, for instance, I did. Pilot welfare audits on dairies and it was on many 50, 60, 100 cow dairies.
The regulations don't kick in until about 800 dairy cows in the United States, and I realized on every single dairy I was walking through creeks and streams, and the cows were walking and urinating and defecating in the creeks and streams. And even though every dairy was exempt, there were over 250,000 dairy cows in that in that area defecating and urinating in the creeks and streams. Large farms by design and definition fall under all of the sustainability rules and regulations and again unfortunately because my parents had a small farm and I like small farms, larger farms have the ability to capitalize quickly on new regulations that are coming for environmental management problems.
And with that, I'll stay on time. Yes, almost, welfare is actually to conclude is dependent on the owners, the managers, the employee's values and attitudes, and what it really comes down to is we can make all the schemes and programs and have all the lectures we want, but it comes down to people having compassion.
