To make meat more tender for the table, farmers and ranchers should try a little tenderness toward their animals before taking them to market.
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That was the advice of top livestock veterinarians at the American Veterinary Medical Association’s fourth annual animal welfare forum, held Friday at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare. The all-day meeting was a sort of sensitivity training session for the American food animal industry.
If cowhands would put away their electric prods and stop shouting harshly at their cattle, said one veterinarian, their cattle would arrive at the slaughterhouse happier, healthier and more marketable. Maybe tastier, too, say these vets, whose specialty is the medical health of animals before they end up in the supermarkets.
Hens cooped up in egg factory operations called “battery cages” show no interest in sex, said another veterinarian, but they would be more fulfilled and productive if they were given the chance to settle into a nest.
Pig farmers who create a comfortable, non-threatening environment for breeding sows will get bigger litters, said a third.
Some speakers argued that the industry can no longer afford to ignore public attitudes about its practices.
“As a result of what’s been said by some of the animal rights and animal welfare people, a lot of us have been rethinking what and how we do things regarding animal care,” said Dr. Lawrence E. Heider, dean of the Atlantic Veterinary College at Canada’s University of Prince Edward Island. “There is an analogy with quality awareness and consumer concern about feeling good about what they eat.”
But the veterinarians also stressed that more humane treatment of farm and ranch animals boosts productivity.
For the last 20 years, Dr. Temple Grandin has been urging cowhands to drop their Wild West ways and use psychology rather than force in handling animals.
Some wonder if treating animals so tenderly makes sense, given that many are destined for the slaughterhouse.
“I’m not saying cattle are people,” said Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University, “but we owe it to animals to give them a decent life.”
Beef cattle are semi-wild animals, she said, and modern cowhands can take advantage of that if they know how.
“Cattle don’t like humans and try to stay away from them,” she said. “They have a sense of personal space and flight zones. If you come up behind them and get within a certain distance, they just naturally move away. They have a point of balance at their shoulder, so that if you get in front of them they go backwards. If you stay behind them, they move forward.”
Ranchers can far more effectively move cattle around and through chutes on ranches, feedlots and slaughterhouses with those methods than with traditional prods, kicks and shouting, Grandin said.
“When people scream at them and hit them, cattle get scared the same way we would,” she said. “They get stressed and they start running into things and each other, and they get bruised. Bruised meat has to be cut away after slaughter.
“Stress can cause the meat to be darker than normal, too, something called a dark cutter. Darkened meat spoils more quickly, so it’s worth less.”
Relaxed cattle, she said, grow faster, take less labor to manage, and have meat that is more tender.
Grandin, who has invented systems of chutes and holding pens that calm and soothe animals now used at many American feedlots and slaughterhouses, urges cattle growers to learn more about animal behavior.
“I can put the perfect system in, but if they have a ram-‘n-jam attitude,” she said, “the system isn’t worth the powder to blow it up.”
Dr. Ian J.H. Duncan, who studies animal behavior at the University of Guelph, Ontario, has developed methods to “ask” animals what sort of care is humane and what is not.
“It struck me that by studying animals’ behavior, we might be able to get objective evidence about their welfare,” said Duncan, who has studied animal behavior for 30 years.
He described how he has developed tests of chickens’ preferences for battery cages by measuring their levels of boredom and frustration. Using those tests he has shown that chickens don’t mind living in battery cages, which, he said, keep birds in small, all-female social groups and are hygienic and easy to manage.
But Duncan said his research also shows that chickens don’t like to lay eggs in the cages. He said their behavior changed markedly for the better, with less aggression toward one another, when they were given a space for nesting.
High-tech techniques have changed animal husbandry so drastically, in some cases, that the majority of Americans have no conception of farming any longer and are sometimes fearful of it.
Dr. Greg BeVier, a 40-year-old veterinarian from Mundelein, said he is worried that less than 2 percent of all Americans now make their living in agriculture. That means few Americans, he said, understand the implications of food production and are more prone to believe in the message of animal rights activists.
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BeVier is vice president and veterinarian of Premium Standard Foods of Princeton, Mo., one of the biggest hog producers in the country.
It is a classic factory operation in which the pigs never leave the building they are born in. Each farm has 1,100 breeding females and 60 males.
The concrete barns are flushed out every two hours for cleanliness, air is purified and temperatures are maintained. Babies nurse for three weeks, then go on pellet diets designed to bring them to a slaughter weight of about 250 pounds within 170 days.
Breeding sows, who grow to about 450 pounds, are artificially inseminated and go through an average of 2.3 pregnancies a year, yielding litters of 10 to 11 piglets. After they give birth six or seven times, their litters tend to be smaller and they are “discharged” from maternity service, which means they are slaughtered for sausage.
Guarding against harmful bacteria, viruses and other ailments from outside, the barns are made “bio-secure,” even to the point they are bird-proofed. Human workers are required to shower before entering and must don sanitized clothing.
“In many ways, big farms like ours improve the welfare of the animals,” BeVier said. “We have the wherewithal to provide ideal conditions.”
BeVier said animal rights opposition to farms such as Premium Standard’s usually is based on emotion rather than scientific data. He said his company, on the other hand, bases its operation purely on quantitative analysis to predict care animals prefer.
“I wish we had tests that could predict how our employees are going to interact with our animals,” he said. He cited research in Australia that showed that breeding sows produced bigger litters if they “liked” and felt safe with the farm manager.
“There is no animal sensitivity test for humans,” he said. “Some people have it, and some people don’t.”