Custodians of pigs are encouraged to familiarize themselves with new requirements for reporting pig movements in Canada and the tools in place to do so.
Under amended regulations under Canada’s Health of Animals Act, due to take effect July 1 to accommodate swine traceability, anyone moving pigs will be required to report those movements to the PigTrace Canada database.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, told those on hand for Manitoba Pork’s 2014 annual general meeting earlier this week the both shippers and receivers will be required to report movements.
The time frame is seven days so those who come under the regulation have seven days to report the information to the PigTrace database.
We are targeting to get that information reported as soon as possible, hopefully real time.
We have a lot of electronic based tools that can help facilitate movement reporting as quickly as possible.
We have a mobile application, we have a desktop application on the web, we have different programming instructions for programmers to link commercial herd management software with PigTrace and we also have a toll free number.
We realize not everyone has the technology to do it electronically but that does save us a lot of time and effort and errors so we are really trying to promote as much as possible electronic reporting tools.
The requirement is to report shipping information, movement information.
When pigs leave one facility to go to another both the shipper and receiver are required to report key movement information and that is the departure and destination locations, the date and time of loading and unloading, the number of animals as well as the vehicle licence plate and any animal identifiers that are required to go on the animals.
Clark says over the next couple of weeks education kits will be sent to the provincial pork organizations across Canada who will in turn include a cover letter outlining specific provincial information and then distribute the packages to anyone who handles pigs.
