Farmscape for February 3, 2022

A training program developed by the Western College of Veterinary Medicine to expand the knowledge of pig care assessors is helping improve the accuracy and consistency of on-farm animal welfare assessments.
In partnership with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the University of Saskatchewan and pork sector stakeholders, researchers with the Western College of Veterinary Medicine have created a systematic and robust training program designed to expand the knowledge base of animal care assessors and improve the accuracy and consistency of their pig care assessments.
Dr. Giuliana Miguel Pacheco, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences, explains on-farm animal care assessments need to be consistent to avoid the problems that can result from inaccurate assessments.

Clip-Dr. Giuliana Miguel Pacheco-Western College of Veterinary Medicine:
This program provides a systematic method to train and retrain observers and observe their level of knowledge.
Providing these, we make sure that assessors receive the same level of training and we could know where their weaknesses or strengths are so further training can be provided if needed.
Pig care assessments verify animal care standards for the industry.
These are used for the quality assurance scheme of meat produced and sold by the Canadian industry.
Pig care assessments can catch issues and provide feedback to producers for continual improvement, for example level of lameness.
In our study, our assessors mostly look at animal-based indicators of welfare, so measurements we can collect by looking at the pig itself, not the housing facility.
Examples of these indicators or measurements are cleanliness, how clean it looks, the skin, ear and tail lesions.
We use these indicators because the tell us of what the animal experienced in that particular environment.

Dr. Miguel Pacheco says, because the consistency of assessments tends to decline over time, periodic retraining is recommended to maintain the quality and robustness of the data that's collected.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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