The chair of the Canadian Pork Council’s Animal Care Technical Group expects the incorporation of requirements of the newly updated Canadian Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs into the Canadian Quality Assurance Program to be completed and ready for testing by mid-2015.
The Canadian Pork Council’s Animal Care Technical Group, a committee made up of representatives of the Canadian Pork Council, provincial pork producer associations, swine veterinarians, animal welfare researchers and government officials has begun the process of incorporating the newly updated Canadian Pig Code of Practice into the Animal Care Assessment Component of the Canadian Quality Assurance Program.
Committee chair Dickson Gould explains the Pig Code, which took over three years to update, outlines national guidelines for the care and handling of pigs and applies to everyone responsible for raising pigs in Canada.
The Canadian Pork Council is responsible for the Animal Care Assessment and also updating the Animal Care Assessment to reflect the new code requirements.
There are actually over 100 requirements and our job will be to find assessment measures that are practical, time efficient, useful for producers.
We are looking to have the revisions completed by mid-2015 and then what we’re looking at is the last half of the year is to pilot test it to make sure it’s functional with the idea that we would release it in 2016.
This process is not just about assessing code requirements but also developing a tool that producers will find helpful for the own operations.
Gould says the goal is to develop a more streamlined CQA program which includes both food safety and animal welfare, that will be valuable to producers as well as customers who buy our pork.
