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PigTRACE Canada Asks CFIA to Expand Allowable Use of 5-Digit Slap Tattoo
Jeff Clark - PigTrace Canada

Farmscape for December 13, 2017

PigTRACE Canada is calling on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to expand the allowable use of the 5-digit herd mark identification number when used as a slap tattoo.
Earlier this month the Canadian Food Inspection Agency revised its list of approved animal indicators to allow PigTRACE ear tags bearing a farm's 5-digit herdmark to identify pigs being moved from the farm to an assembly yard as well as from one assembly yard to another and then on to slaughter.
Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says a similar change is being requested for farms that use the 5-digit herdmark as a slap tattoo.

Clip-Jeff Clark-PigTRACE Canada:
The herd mark ear tag itself is very popular.
Pretty well most of our sow barns, farrowing barns in Canada use that both for just complying with PigTRACE but also for their herd management.
We allow a little bit of extra space on the ear tag for people to print their own numbers, their own sow numbers.
We'll either print them free of charge or they can write them on with a marker, those additional management numbers.
So it's good news in terms of CFIA allowing the herd mark to be used for assembly yard to assembly yard movements before slaughter but we still have some work to do though on use of the herdmark as a shoulder slap tattoo.
That tattoo number is approved for animals going direct to slaughter or through an assembly yard prior to slaughter but that assembly yard has to be 100 percent only used for movements direct to slaughter.
What we're finding is, especially in eastern Canada, there's quite a few yards that will assemble pigs.
Some of them go direct to slaughter, other ones will go to a secondary assembly yard prior to slaughter.
CFIA currently won't allow us to use the herdmark at those sites as a slap tattoo and we still have quite a bit of work to do there to get CFIA to allow is to do that.

Improving regulatory enforcement changes at assembly points is being identified as one of PigTRACE's priorities for December and January.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.


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