Farmscape for August 27, 2015

Developing new programs to enhance swine welfare will be the focus of a new position being created by the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, in partnership with the Prairie Swine Centre.
A team of pork industry representatives will begin interviewing candidates next month to fill the position of ethologist with a focus on swine, who will assume the role of NSERC Industrial Chair in Swine Welfare.
The new scientist will be resident at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine and part of a multi-disciplinary team of scientists at the Prairie Swine Centre.
Prairie Swine Centre president and CEO Lee Whittington explains the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council's industrial chair program allows industry dollars to be doubled and is being used to structure a new set of resources for the pig industry.

Clip-Lee Whittington-Prairie Swine Centre:
The chair will actually probably be up to 5 maybe even 6 positions which will include the leader, and that's the chair, the person that we're interviewing for, but they will be able to bring in a post doctoral fellow, some graduate students and a new technician, and so building the resources that the industry has available to address some of the challenges that we will face now and in the future.
What we will be looking for is our ability to determine good welfare in a variety of circumstances.
No two pork producers raise pigs in exactly the same way and so we're going to be looking for the chair in welfare to build a research program that will help us demonstrate that this group of pigs in this particular barn on this day is in fact having good welfare.
Some of those pigs will be on slats and some of them will be on a partially slatted floor and others will be in large groups and some will be in small groups.
So overall we're looking for this position to help bring some light and some science to the question of what is good welfare and how are we going to measure it in a commercial barn?

Whittington says the long term goal is to take out some of the subjectivity.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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