The associate executive director of the Canadian Pork Council says Canada’s updated Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs has shown the value of Canada’s consensus based approach to addressing animal welfare issues.
The National Farm Animal Care Council’s updated Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs in Canada was made public in March.
Over the next 18 months the Canadian Pork Council will be updating and rebranding the Canadian Quality Assurance Program, the Canadian pork industry’s on farm food safety program, including incorporating changes to the Pig Code of Practice into the Animal Care Assessment component of the program.
Catherine Scovil, the associate executive director of the Canadian Pork Council, suggests animal care codes and assessment are a uniquely Canadian approach to addressing animal welfare and it’s an approach that gives producers a really solid and credible means to demonstrate how they’re taking care of their animals.
The Pig Code is an excellent testament to how these codes and the code process works.
The National Farm Animal Care Council took over the codes and certainly revamped the process to make sure it’s solid and credible and transparent and our code really shows that this is possible.
It’s possible for a diverse group of stakeholders to get together and chart a way forward and to have a code that really does meet the guidelines or the principles that are set out for codes, good for the animals, workable for producers and acceptable to society.
Scovil notes both food safety and animal care are built on continual improvement so as we look to rebrand Canadian Quality Assurance the goal is to make the program more transparent, easier to review and audit, make it more user friendly and deliver more value to producers.
