The chair of the National Farm Animal Care Council’s Pig Code Development Committee is confident committee members will be able to meet the challenge of reaching consensus on a final updated Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs in Canada.
During its 60 day public comment period, which ended August 3, the National Farm Animal Care Council’s proposed updated Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs in Canada attracted over 47 hundred submissions from pork producers and processors, consumers, animal welfare activists, scientists and government.
Florian Possberg, the chair of the Pig Code Development Committee, acknowledges sorting through those comments and reaching consensus on what should be included in the final code will pose a challenge.
The committee that developed the draft code is actually going to be coming together in a few weeks time to try and digest all the public comments that have come back.
We will use that information to look at what’s appropriate to stay in the code to become part of the permanent code, what parts have gotten comments that we need to have a second look at.
That’s going to be a difficult process because of the number of comments that have come back but it is part of the process and we will go through that and then as a committee we’ll have to decide what is appropriate to put in the final code that we expect will be done some time towards the end of the year.
Possberg notes the update process requires consensus among all members of the code development committee but all members are focused on coming up with a code on which everyone can agree and he is optimistic the committee will be able to finish the process.
