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Invoice crowd for Animal science

I'm going to talk a lot about a lot of things about livestock tonight and one of the first things I hope this is going to work one of the first things I want to talk about when you're working with any animal doesn't matter what animal it is even doing Veterinary work on a dog or a cat a calm animal is easier to handle once an animal gets all scared it takes half an hour from him to Cal back down so the secret is don't get him upset in the first place another little secret is I can't emphasize enough the importance of having a non-slip floor a handling facility animals panic when they start to slip they seem like a small thing but it's not a small thing you've all walked on Ice it's not good let's keep them calm now how do we know when horses and cattle are calm or they're getting all excited and they're getting all scared scared and when they get agitated it's fear like the fear circuits animals brains have been completely mapped when you got nice soft brown eyes on cattle and horses then they're calm and when they start to get scared you'll start to see the whites of their eyes there's actually been scientific research on this how scientists figure out that when the whites of the eyes show the animals getting scared because you can stop it with Valium not recommending you do that ears are forward you know when the ears go back also watch what they're looking at with the ears the Tail's switching tail is switching in cattle and horses they're getting upset that's your early warning before it kicks you or it bucks you off heads up looking around ones with a really high temperament heads up looking around ears pinned back want to get you more aware of what that animal is doing be better observers you know that's also going to help really improve safety too in working with livestock now some of the very first work I did was to look for all of the little distractions that animals are afraid of I found if you get rid of distractions like a chain hanging down in a shoot a shadow a reflection I always get asked all the time do cattle know they're going to get slaughtered in fact I get this thing back from grand.com on my website and like eight people had typed into Google do animals know they're going to die and that's a question that I had to answer very early in my career so I'd go over to the local Swift plant and watch the cattle going up the shoot and then I would go over to the feed lot and watch the cattle going up the into the squeeze shoot and they behaved the same way in both places if they knew that they were going to die they would be much more upset at the slaughter plant no they're afraid of things like the dark find to put a light on the shoot entrance they go right up to shoot now one of the big problems that eggs got today is they're not communicating with the public one thing that really frustrates me I've worked a long time really working on improving Slaughter plants well the public still thinks they're bad just before I came here I had a freshman call me a freshman English major well her only source of information was an animal activist website I explained to her that a lot of things have improved you need to look at some other websites look at some other books one of the things we need to be doing is showing people what we do two and a half years ago I put my stunning videos and Meat Plant handling videos up on YouTube industry had a gigantic fit well I find that the Public's just curious because when I went out to Hollywood you know what the Hollywood press wanted to talk about what is a feed lot how do Slaughter plants work they just want to know and one of the big problems we have with the internet today is it makes radicals on both sides of an issue of a gigantic voice we got to start talking to all the just regular people out there in the middle it's been really interesting being out on the road and I find that people are really surprised when they find out things like McDonald's actually audit Slaughter plants and they've been doing it for the last 10 years it really very frustrating to me work on cleaning up slaughter houses and I'm not going to call them Harvest plants I think that's BS I I found that the s word was just fine out in Hollywood in just a real matter OFA way you got to show what you're doing and if you're doing something to really make you squirm maybe you're going to need to change it and I have found I've taken a lot of people through well-run Slaughter plant and I they're kind of amazed at how commonly the cattle walk up the shoot they kind of go oh well that's not so bad now let's look at things that when animals get into a novel environment that's going to stop their movement changes in the type of floor now if you have a dairy cow that's used to walking over two different kinds of floor she's going to walk right over it but you got a beef animal goes into a new facility it's going to stop give it an opportunity to stop and put the head down because if you just push them up there they're going to turn back on you here's a bad situation we got a lot of Reflections you can get time of day effects where maybe truck loading in the morning works just great truck loading in the late afternoon's terrible because the sun's coming up over the top of the truck so maybe it change the time that you load by two hours so you don't blind them livestock have a tendency to go from a dark place to a brighter place like you can light up inside the a building at night light up the inside of a trailer and they'll tend to go in but they're not going to go into blinding light you've all been on the freeway where the sun's coming up and it's just BL bling you well an animal doesn't want to go into that neither do you so the first work I ever did I got down in the shoots to see what cattle were seeing people thought that was really crazy to look at what cattle were seeing and people often ask me well how did autism help me in my work with animals I'm an extreme visible thinker the HBO movie did a great job of showing how I think visually and Amazon does have it maybe I shouldn't have brought that up but I did and you know but to me as a complete visual thinker it seemed obvious to me to look at what cattle were seeing and I found at one feed yard this working facility worked great and then I had the same it was same design and another feed yard it worked badly and it was due to the orientation to the sun you got people standing there well those people either got to get out of the way or they're going to need to uh put solid side up there you know where it's really important to put solid sides Up is on perimeters of things you know where there's feed trucks gone by there's people standing deep in the flight zone look at how that animal is avoiding walking on the Sunbeam I want to get you aware of those sorts of things if one of the things I want you to do is be observant what's the animal sound like what is he um uh looking at if he's pooping he's probably scared don't want him doing that this is what I call the black hole effect real outside and inside this cattle handling facility this building is real super dark and on a sunny day this doesn't work very well and the problem I've got if I try to light this up with electric lights it doesn't work the sun's a 100 times brighter than any electric light I can buy that electric light will work for tracting them in at night works great what I got to do in this building is I got to rip tin off I got to get natural daylight in there if you're building a new facility strong strongly recommend white translucent skylights I went into a fantastic Dairy where their entire milking part or had concrete walls up to about here and then the whole top part was translucent garage doors that they could open up in the summertime and it made it so bright because what you want is nice shadow free natural light now this is a place that's been retrofitted and they've put in white translucent panels so now the cattle see that natural light but it doesn't have shadows and one place where you really need to have solid is a crowd gate most important gate in the whole thing no matter what your design is is your crowd gate so they don't tend to turn back on you and cram the gate back into your face do they know they're going to get slaughtered I show this slide all the time to my students and I say tell me something that's wrong in this slide and they'll point out about the chain there okay one thing that's good is you got the white translucent panels but there's something else really wrong in this slide that I find that over half my students don't see it sometimes the most obvious is the least obvious well how about the three guys standing right where they shouldn't be standing where you're driving the cattle right into the three guys and one of them's got mirrored sunglasses on that's going to make him really scary you got to get the people out of there okay so some curved facilities and one advantage of a curve is animals have a natural tendency to go back to where they came from is you want to use that natural behavior Outer Perimeter that's the most important part of it to have solid unless you're out in the middle of nowhere but if you're aware there's any distractions uh another thing that a curve shoot does is it cuts down on the amount of walking because you can cut across the circle people don't like to walk and I'm really really pleased that there's so much more interest today in low stress livestock handling I think that's really great but all of these methods require more walking moving smaller groups of animals and I get very frustrated because um you know they do it when I'm there but then when my back's turned then they're bringing up too many cattle in a meat packing plant where we got a lot of distractions they want to cover everything up and make it completely solid another advantage of that curved shoot is as those animals enter they don't see all the people standing around the squee shoot because they tend to not want to approach visible people now you've got to lay these things out right and I don't think this has a PO yeah it does have a pointer good you got to lay it out right because when an animal is standing right there he's got to be able to see up their two body lengths if you bend it too sharp right here it will not work that's what I call Dead ending the shoot and I have a book called Humane livestock handling where I've got all the drawings in it they did have a few copies here they've sold out but the bookstore can order them it's Humane livestock handling but this is the real critical part of the design another thing in laying out a tub is you want to go around in a full half circle so you take advantage of the natural tendency to go back to where they came from now I went down and visited the Sheep unit just right here on the campus it's really nice it goes around with a full half circle because little tubs where it's sort of a quarter Circle kind of goes like that those are kind of useless and but you want to get a situation where you come on around and you get that following Behavior another important design feature is you want to make sure you have enough single file leadup shoot space so I can use following Behavior you know if that leadup shoot only holds like two cows in there I can't get any following Behavior because I like to wait until the shoot's almost empty and then bring up five or six animals and fill up the SHO shoot that I'm using following now you'll notice right here he's got the back stop tied up people tend to put in too many back stops right there at that entrance if you got that back stop gate down they won't go in so another handy thing you can do is put a remote control rope on there then you can work that from over in the crowd pin and you're not making all those cattle go clumping through it I'm kind of amazed sometimes how I can fix up a facility with simple things like a remote control rope blocking up a the side where they can see a reflection on a truck people working with animals need to understand flight zone if you have a tame Cales like I saw being fitted for showing today they got no flights on you can you can touch them you can groom groom them these sheep have got some flights on and if you have an animal that's jumping up in the shoot it's doing that because you're too close back up back up up and get out of the flight zone don't try to push it back down that's going to make the animal even more crazy now people have been doing a lot more selection for temperament and we're getting calmer cattle today we've done some work looking at Little Hair whirls that cattle have on their foreheads and when cattle have a real high up hair whirl tend to be more flighty and over the last 15 years people have been selecting for calmer so we got less of those real crazy cat we better be careful because some of these calmer cattle might be less Vigilant on protecting their baby see there's always a trade-off I want to get rid of the nut cases but you wouldn't necessarily want to select for the absolute most Dead Calm animals okay here's a handy dandy way to get them in the squeeze shoot without so many props imagine this is the tailgate to The Squeeze shoot so I stand Here tailgate opens and it quickly just like this walk back by the shoulder of the the next animal in line and when I walk back by him in the opposite direction of desired movement the quick movement it often makes them go forward that sounds kind of counter counterintuitive a basic principle this works out on pasture too is when you walk in the opposite direction of desired movement in the flight zone they tend to go forward now when you're in a shoot situation like this the point of balance will be right here at the shoulder when you're up real close to them the mistake that people make is they stand here at the head and P poke the butt I got to get people stop doing that so okay they might stand back here and then poke the butt and that often works but it doesn't work as better as well as just going like this now when you're up real close in the choot that point of balance is going to be at the shoulder you've got to get behind the shoulder to make him go forward now if you're further out away let's say you're out here somewhere you may move along and the point of balance maybe just past the eye the eye is you get further away the point of balance tends to move forward but the point of balance is never in front of the eye it's got to be somewhere from behind the eye to the shoulder and when you get in real close I find it I find when we're working up close in in shoots I've got to tell them at the shoulder otherwise they don't reliably go forward okay right there I'm using a stick with a flag on it to turn an anim you get I want people to be real calm with this thing I'm talking about doing very slight movements I want to get rid of all the yelling and screaming the first thing we got to do on low stress handling is you got to get everybody to calm down yelling and screaming at cattle is extremely extremely stressful it's more stressful than the sound of a gate slamming because they know you're screaming at it so all the yelling and screaming and all the flapping around and what do I think about electric produ get it out of your hand sometimes you might have a stubborn animal that won't go in the squeeze shoot and it's better to pick up the prod and use it than be bend the her tail off or hitting her but you should not be carrying the electric Pride around in your hand something else should be the thing for your hand now notice here that this round Crow pen is filled half full good cattle handling requires more walking now sheep on the other hand are the ultimate follower I can just move them in Continuous Flow but if a cattle and pits you want to move small separate groups and I'm constantly fighting people putting too many cattle in the crowd pen so what you want to do is is you wait until there's space in shooting and just bring the cattle up around here and pass on through you want to use a crowd pen as a passing through pin and if you really want to follow good low stress handling techniques you know one thing you got to have is enough leadup shoot space okay let's say you got a little portable panel thing it's got a little straight shoots two cows long once you get a couple more panels and make the lead up a bit longer then you that can that's a simple thing you can do that can really improve handling now notice that crowd Gate's just on the first Notch you don't need to be pushing and shoving with the crowd gate also notice he's standing back because if he stands here they won't go in now half full if your crowd pen holds 10 stuff you bring up five if it holds 30 stuff you bring up 15 half full means half full now the big packing plants now uh some of the big companies now have video auditing where Auditors over the internet can look at what's going on in the crowd path and I had a chance to go to Aeros site Mission Control where video cameras hooked up to 23 of the large plants and I could look in and see what was going on if they're unloading ramp and their crowd pens and their stunning area and my favorite plant that I'd worked so hard on with low stress handling that had a new manager that seemed to be so interested in it 30 cattle jammed in the crowd pen and two hot shots in the crowd pen they don't even need to have electric PES in that Crow P I was so mad so mad especially because it was that particular plant and I had just been down there working with them on handling people don't want to walk that's why they were jamming all those cattle in there because the good handling is going to require a lot more walking okay what are the ears doing look at how the zebra and the horse have an ear on each other the other ears on me watch those ears they Point their ears towards things they're concerned about me I want you to watch for those kind of things okay here are some principles of restraint non-slip flooring we already talked about that and I went over to your Meats lab today I'm not going to call it the Harvest facility I really think that's BS I I use the S word in Hollywood goes over just fine and your stun box your beautiful brand new stun box the floor is too slippery and what happens when you have a floor that's too slippery after they pee in there then they start jigging and they just start doing their foot like this in the panic and you're going to need to put a steel grading in there you can go on grand.com I've got a a picture in there it shows exactly how to build the grading you got to weld the rods this way not on top of each other and you know what they're going to settle right down in that stun box and then it's going to work just fine I'm amazed at what I can do with nonslip flooring jerky motion scares sudden jerky motion scares both seeing it and feeling it and one thing that was really cool at the movie site is I had this big camera that's called a giraffe with a hothead big camera boom and it just moves smooth as silk like this and you know what you can put that right over the top for her a cattle it's like it's not there because it doesn't do jerky motion optimal pressure animals struggles they tend to squish it too hard that's true whether you have a hydraulic squeeze shoot or you're holding a cat and non-slip flooring okay if you're going to become veterinarians let's give the dog a nonslip floor to stand on so he's not slipping around and if you use a blindfold to block Vision it's got to be completely opaque t-shirt that doesn't work not opaque enough oh don't tell me this isn't going to work next slide please okay I want to just talk some about about temperament we did some of the very first studies on looking at temperament and weight Game Boy when we did this stuff it was looked that like we were crazy and a cattle that scored a four the ones that try to come out the top of squeeze shoot they had less weight gain this has been replicated I like to do the pioneering stuff we did the Hair World stuff one of the first Journal article reviewer I wrote back and said that was silly and it wasn't science you're going to reject our paper well now we've got people involved in all kinds of high flute and genetic stuff sighting that paper now you know I tell my students if a paper gets rejected there's three reasons it's an absolute piece of garbage it's so new that nobody believes it or it's pure politics you know that's uh that's the three reasons why papers get rejected okay let's go to the next slide this is an important slide because I want to really get the idea across to you about handling stress okay High cortisol levels and rough handling that gets lot of cortisol a lot of stress you you calm you do calmer handling with the cattle then you get less fear stress why is the dairy cow lower because the dairy cow is trained this brings up a very important principle When Animals voluntarily cooperate you cut down the fear stress so one of the things that's being taught in many of the low stress handling workshops now is to take young heers and practice going through the shoot let's make first experiences coming into the Corral's good first experiences not bad first experiences and right there we've got trained analog that was another thing that was totally supposed to be totally impossible we trained analou to voluntarily cooperate and get blood samples and shots in return for food treats okay next slide an animal's first experience with something new needs to be good make sure that your horse's first experience with a horse trailer is a good first experience because if that first experience is bad he's going to be afraid of it and you can get a fear memory and that fear memory is something the animal either was hearing or looking at the moment that it happened like there was an elephant that hated diesel powered man if it ran with a diesel it was bad if it ran with gas it was fine another animal was afraid of a long sticks anything that was a long straight thing has he been hit with sticks uh an animal knows the difference between the good person's voice and the bad person's voice they pick up on things that happened right when the bad thing happened and we need to be working more on acclimating animals the different handling procedures let go to the next slide now the thing about a new experience or something new things that are new are both scary and attractive they are attractive when the animal can voluntarily approach and they are scary if you Corner the animal and shove it in their face I call that the Paradox of novelty so I put that clipboard down there and all C came up to it Wind Blows the paper they back up the paper stops blowing they come back and I used to call that curiously a fright and I you know you see in 1998 when we were first you know fooling around doing this and I thought there's got to be like a switch in the frame because they act like they're either fearful or they're attracted to it the switch has now been found ni funded research on drug addiction they found the switch the nucleus accumbent brain can either be go to seek or it can go to fear it can switch back and forth genetically flighty animals the switch tends to be more balanced towards fear let's go to the next slide now if you have animals really calm genetics you can introduce something suddenly you don't get scared because a common test is opening an umbrella suddenly a novel stimulus there's been some interesting research now done in France that just came out this year on well do the cattle know they're going to die most of that fear you get at the slaughter plant it's fear of novelty because animals that would get really scared when you popped an umbrella in their face out at the farm are the same animals that had higher heart rate and had higher stress responses at the slaughter plant it's feir of novelty it's not fear of of getting slaughtered let's go to the next Slide Man on a horse man on the ground cattle view that as two totally different things I've seen some really dangerous situations where you have cattle that might have a TW foot flights on and they're real super gentle when they're worked on a horse but then when you handle them on foot they scatter it's important that they get trained to both because I do a lot of work with the meat plants and I've seen some real dangerous stuff where you've had cattle come in never been worked on foot and they've run over some people at the plane because now you got a 50ft flight zone in a 20ft pan that's not a safe situation so I think it's important to get cattle habituated to four-wheelers horses on foot they need practice going in and out of pens and make sure when you first introduce the new thing it's done in a calm careful way one of the best ways to introduce the animals to four-wheeler would be just bring it out in the field and let them come up and sniff it but don't bring it out and then chase them with it because I just recently talked to some people where the cattle been so terrorized with a four-wheeler that I don't think they're going to be able to use a four-wheeler on that herd I mean half the herd is abs absolutely totally scared of them and then we've got to work on preventing fear memories because you have a horse it's really scared of something I just talked to uh some people this afternoon we were discussing a horse that Kicks When You cinch it up otherwise it's a perfect riding horse it's just when you cinch it up well it was abused probably kicked in the gut a whole bunch of times and it doesn't forget that that's the problem and unfortunately I am going to have to put a cinch on it now for the horse man on the ground man on the horse two different file folders in the animal's brain I've seen horses where they were fine for veterinarian shoe Bucky off when you ride them because the abuse that happened with riding or you can have just the opposite riding's bad on the ground's good now when you think about it it's a different picture see an animal is a sensory based thinker they store their memories as pictures as sounds as touch Sensations I've seen several horses where you use a one piece bit they act just fine use a jointed snaffle they're going berserk and the reason for that is they were abused with one those horrible Twisted wired jointed Snapples so now all jointed bits are bad but I want you to go down in the tack room and take some different kinds of bits hold them in your hand and think about how they feel differently because sometimes a horse is afraid of a particular kind of bit I can just get rid of it that's like an easy way if I can like eliminate the thing they're afraid of but if you have a hor is afraid of sticks that's going to be hard I can't get rid of all the show sticks and things like that microphone stands you're going to have that stuff around next slide please now I want to talk about measuring animal welfare because I've gotten very frustrated going to places I build nice facilities half my clients tore up the stuff and wrecked it and the only thing that kept me going is there were a few clients really did things right and when I first started my career I thought I could fix everything with equipment uhuh I can only fix half of the problems with equipment the other things I got to fix with management so then I spent more and more time training managers I've gotten where I don't want to train the employees I got to convince the managers that good handling is really important now I'm a paco auditor trainer I train the people that audit the plants that are hired by people like McDonald's and Wendy's to audit plants to make sure they do things Sprite and when we started doing that 10 years ago it resulted in more change than I'd seen in a 25e career prior to that and I was also amazed and how we took some of the old junkie plants and I fixed them because I had to figure out a way to fix these plants without spending a fortune I was amazed it what oh steel rods in the floor of the stun box I was amazed how that worked rubber tire mats put out on the unloading dock amazing that's amazing what you can do with cardboard and plywood and portable lights and moving lights and changing how people handle the cattle I fixed most of the old plants and out of 75 plants on the McDonald's approved supplier list only three Had to Do complete makeovers expensive REM models everybody else we fixed with the simple things and I wrote up a really simple scoring system I didn't tell plants how they had to build their facilities they had to achieve certain outcomes this is a different way of looking at things are we going to tell people how to do things I don't care whether it's health care or whether it's education we need to be looking more at what kind of outcomes that we're getting on things and by doing this measurement it prevents bad from becoming normal because some of these plants that went back to like jamming 30 cattle in the crowd pan it actually was a year later that I looked at the video they regress back slowly into these old bad habits I call it bad becoming normal how did the dairy industry get up to 25% lame cows that happened slowly I'm very happy that the cows here are really good on Lamers and so we got to measure handing we got to measure things like handling to keep it good go to the next slide and when we're developing systems for you know measuring and for evaluating things we got to get rid of these vague words like adequate proper and sufficient what does that mean you see the normal human mind tends to oversimplify there's been research that shows that's true tends to get too abstract I don't know what proper handling is your idea of proper handling might be very different than mine maybe Hot Shot 10 times on every animal some people might think that's proper handling I think that's just terrible you need to be writing guidelines so that they'll be interpreted the same way by different people let's go to the next slide you know this is an example of a well-written guideline all pigs have to have enough room to all lay down without being on top of each other you got to write something that's clear you don't just say give them enough room next slide okay let's look at things for scoring animal handling on a ranch I want animals moving at a walk and a trot not at a run so what percentage of the cattle were moved at a walk and a trot how many animals fell down during handling I hope none but if you got animals falling down and ramming into things that's not very good how many animals vocalize that's one of the ones that really worked in the plants the pass of McDonald's on it you allowed to only have three cattle in the stunning shoot moo if more than three cattle mooo you fa the on it and why was vocalization a good measure because when you do bad things they move poke them with a prod more likely to move Nutcracker their head and the squeeze shoot they're going to move now obviously if you brand them they're going to move so when you're doing this for a handling on it you measure can I get them into the squeeze shoot and get them caught can I catch them without them moving they moov when you catch them then you're hurt them with a squeeze shoot if they're mooving back in the snake or whatever kind of shoot you have because you proding them all up that's something bad that needs to stop and then how many animals did use the electric prod on now some people say well I just bam them I've seen too many cattle abused when they absolutely wouldn't go in the squee I'm the one who picked up the electric prod before somebody broke a tail off you know but then get it out of your hand and put it away let's go to the next slide this is the very simple scoring system that we used for scoring the plants we measure five simple outcome variables this uses what's called a hup approach which stands for hazard analysis critical control points what are the really important things that I need to measure okay how many cattle did I shoot with the stunner on a single shot it's got to be 95% to pass I got to get them all ins sensible how many that Pok with the electric prod how many were moving in the stunning area how many fell down that's measured in unloading and it's measured going up the stunning shoot but you see these are outcomes they can move do to prods they can move to a Mis stun they can move to a gate being slammed on them a restraint device that squashes them that'll make them move these are outcome variables you don't see anything in here about equipment design I deliberately took all the design stuff out of it we're not going to tell them how to make a floor but they got to you that if they have more than 1% of the cattle fall they fail the audit and then they better fix the floor that's what they're going to need to do and everything's on a per animal basis was the pride used on that cow yes or no did move yes or no it's very very simple very easy to train people because I got to have something where I can train people day and a half Workshop that's the reality let's go to the next slide now the thing is good about this is whether I audit that plant you audit the plant we're getting the same scores that's what's called interobserver reliability let's go to the next slide now in 1996 only 30% of the plants could pass the stunning on it you know why they couldn't pass it lack of Maintenance they simply didn't take care of the equipment well now they're doing a lot better job they they've got test stands they got you know documented maintenance programs you know 2010 data 100% of the plants passed on the stunning audit you can go on gon.com and look at all the figures from these audits you manage things that you measure and the thing is good about measurement is I can tell am I getting worse or am I getting better now what we've been finding with the video auditing is that people tend to good when the person with the clipboard is out there and what we found is the stunning doesn't change that's so dependent on the maintenance of the equipment it's the handling backs turn the PRS come out hate to say it happened in a whole bunch of different plants then they were doing their internal Audits and some of them sort of did some stuff on that it's the handling it's constant vigilance and what I have found on cattle handling is it's about 20% of people that just always stay good they're the natural low stress stockmanship people then I can train most others and this about 10% shouldn't be hand out there with cattle because they like to do bad things to them and I know that's not nice but that's what we found since the video auditing has been put in let's go to the next Slide the principle is you measure a small number of critical control points that measure a multitude of problems it's a very simple concept let's say we applied that to schools well I got three things get really good scores on International tests stay out of trouble with the law get and keep decent jobs well that would be a pretty good outcome measure you see I learned a lot from this to look at problems in kind of a different way and the principle is you got to pick out critical control points that easy to measure that measure a multitude of problems I'm not going to tell them what kind of stunning equipment to use or what kind of cattle handling equipment to use they've got to make these measures and then we do have a few things that are forbidden you can't do things like hang cadle up by the ankle that you can't drag down there's some stuff that's forbidden but as long as you don't do that stuff you're free to design it however you want let's go to the next Slide the other thing is it's not a paperwork on it there's a tendency today to change everything into paperwork on it oh let me tell you people are good at faking paperwork I worked in the construction industry you know the bids and you know saw all that stuff the trucker log books seen all that stuff the other thing is what looking at stuff that's directly observable I want practical and anybody that's interested in this kind of stuff I've got a book I've done with cabie called improving Animal Welfare practical approach title of the book tells you how to set up auditing programs let's go on to the next [Music] slide well I can also use the measurements to show how simple changes improved the animal handling you cannot have air blowing in their face you got air blowing in their face they won't go up the shoot so I changed the ventilation in the plant and I went from 4 and a half% vocalizing down to zero because I didn't have to PR them all the time let's go to the next slide this one was for pegs and I just lit up the entrance with a light that I taped to the entrance of the shoot with duct tape and we went from 38% down to four all I did was stick a light on the entrance of the shoot you know the other thing we got to get people to do is to use behavior and not force and this is a hard concept for people some people to get their head around it still amazes me how one little light makes such a big difference go on to the next slide now this is my Center track restrainer system you've got that in the plant right here in highum in fact half the cattle in this country when they're handled in a meat plant they handled in my Center track restrainer system now right here we've got a nonslip ramp notice how it looks a lot like to dip that entrance and in the movie and that thing with a metal plate in the movie that actually happened they drowned those cattle and they didn't even try to use it they just assumed it wouldn't work where you let the cattle walk in now 35 years later I got people making the same mistake this year in 2010 I had one plant cut their ramp in half another plant took the cleats off and the one that took the cleats off I'm really annoyed at because they let their light break and it's instead of replacing their light they messed around with the ramp you see and I think some of this problem is they're not seeing the behavior well they need to watch the segment in the movie about the design of the ramp it's exactly the same thing you get it light it right you also have to have a false floor here so they don't see it this whole thing is s feet above the floor you know this gets back to the work I did with optical illusions and you control what they see and then they'll walk right in there we'll have to next slide now one of the problems you got to make sure you don't have is What's called the visual Cliff when I took psychology I studied the visual cliff and both the animals and babies don't want to walk out over a plate glass that's 4 feet above the ground and you get things right and the visual cliff and the fear of falling is a primal fear because I had a chance to go to a virtual reality room okay I walk into this thing it looks like the set of a other thing at a TV station very looking and obviously there weren't any Holes in the Floor or anything like that so you put on this helmet and the next thing I know I'm on this balcony and they're going to push me off this balcony and I yelled and I fell down I was standing on a wooden floor in front of a paper thing like you have for the weather deal at a TV station I knew it was I saw it when before I put the helmet on but that's such a powerful effect that I reacted to that and I've read scientific papers where people react to that they know there's no trap door in the floor they try to push somebody into a trap door let's go to the next slide okay put a light on their entrance I went from 8% moving down to 0% here's the false floor 9% moving down to zero another one where I had a headgate that squashed their neck I make it looser they stopped doing this is simple things I want to get you thinking about this cuz I know a lot of people today don't want to build a lot of really expensive things let's go on to the next slide there's the light but you got to make sure it doesn't break oh that frustrated me and they somebody I couldn't believe some of the stuff they did and the thing is it was well intentioned I'm really beginning to see that they're not seeing it sometimes the most obvious is the least obvious I read about the Japanese nuclear power plant disaster and I go how could they do this how could they put the emergency generators that run the backup pump that keeps the reactors from burning up in the basement you live next to the Sea what's going to happen to those generators in the basement they're going to go underwater and they don't work when they're underwater and that's why four nuclear power plants burned up that's the reason the earthquake came and on at least three of the plants the generators came on and everything was working not sure of one of them I've had to piece a lot of stuff together in the papers they've not released all the drawings on it but why didn't they have submarine doors sometimes the most obvious is the least obvious Chernobyl is even stupider a nuclear power plant that naked nuclear power plant no containment building then you decide you're going to do a test and you're going to turn off all your safety systems you know I had a saying when I was working all the time in construction never underestimate the laziness of the stupidity of people operating equipment okay let's go to the next slide now we get in the slaughter plants pretty nice but I've got a welfare issue I'm getting really worried about now and that's how the animals behave coming in the plant pigs have been fed so much ractopamine that they're really really weak cattle that are so super wild where they haven't been handled on foot those are real super dangerous to handle um animals that have been jacked up on too many beta agonists and ractopamine those kind of products and they're coming in heat stressed coming in lame old dairy cows that are half dead you know we're getting to where we're going to have to push back down the supply chain you got to give me an animal I can handle not something that's crazy weak half dead or heat stressed let's go to the next slide and there's different kinds of uh of variables and what I've been talking about so far is animal-based guideline you know it's an outcome measure and then you have a few things you just ban and the old way of looking at things is all these engineering things where you're telling people exactly how to do things there's a few engineering things I need like maybe ammonia levels indoor buildings there's a few things like that I'm going to need but I don't want to get into the minutia telling you how to build stalls for dairy cows I'd rather measure the outcome lameness hot lesions that's the outcome if there's something wrong with your stalls let's go to the next slide well these are outcome measures I want to measure on a dairy how many skinny cows have I got how about lameness there's a zillion different things that make lameness you're doing stuff bad management I'll catch you on the lameness score when they're walking out of the Parlor how many filthy dirty ones how many have sores like neglected cancer eyes and cattle how about co- condition for your organic guys no it's not okay to have lice and bald spots and ringworm on calves no that's not all right I've seen some bad becoming normal on that how about ammonia levels and indoor facilities and abnormal behavior these are very basic things that i' want to measure on any Farm they're simple things they're easy to measure let's go to the next slide now lameness is a good outcome measure because look at all the different things that can make a cow so when I'm doing an audit which is kind of like a screening tool for problems it's up to the veterinarians and the animal scientists to fix the lameness but I can pinpoint that there's a par lameness scoring I can pinpoint many different problems let's go to the next slide well then there's some things we're going to have to get rid of the public is simply not going to accept s station stalls let's get rid of them and we're going to need to change some pig genetics get some pigs that get along better with each other and don't fight so much as we've been 25 years pigs living in boxes so there's been no selection pressure pigs that don't [Music] fight you know the small chicken cages there's some good things out there Fair Oaks Farm doing a fantastic job on educating the public they got a calf cam you can go to JS West look at their chicken cam I'm getting to the point now where we need to be just streaming it all out to the internet because if we don't show it other people are going to show it for us and remember my freshman that I just talked to freshman English major and uh the websites uh she's not you know she doesn't even know how to search scientific databases in fact I explained to her about the pub Med database science direct Google Scholar she didn't even know those things existed well this gets into critical thinking and really digging into things let's go to the next slide well and these are a few input measures that you need there's still a few things where you know space requirements there's a few engineering measures but we need to be getting away from mytia of telling people exactly how to build things and go more towards outcome measures let's go to the next slide that's my website um grand.com I got lots and lots of information on there and hopefully now we got some time for some questions because I always like to do some questions and just great to have everybody here thank you Dr gron for coming to Utah state that was a very inspiring talk and it's a truly a Dre com true to see you talk live my question um concerns management you mentioned that uh good and bad managers have a lot to do with how Animal Welfare is implemented in systems yes if managers don't get on board with the idea of animal welfare in your mind what's the most effective way to change that behavior is it incentive programs is it sanction they they in the McDonald's program 10 years ago out of 75 plants three plant managers were fired or retired uh management has got to buy in to doing things right and it's not just Animal Welfare the other thing is economic incentives I did a study where I looked at bruises on cattle I know how to get rid of bruises when people have to pay for them you get rid of them it's that simple I looked at liveweight cattle versus carcass weight cattle and when the feed Lots had to pay for the bruises guess what they got rid of them okay weak pigs that you can't handle weak awful pigs now one plant got rid of them it's a $25 expenses fee for the use of the Bobcat loader to move the pigs around I visited that plant just a few weeks ago their pigs were really good two years ago their pigs were awful well then the farmer is going to make sure his pigs are strong enough to walk off the truck and walk up to the stunner economic incentives have a really big effect but there's some managers where things don't change until management gets changed see now in big corporations it's much easier to get rid of managers some of the worst problems I've seen little small meat packing plant Management's family and I what I have found on the really small little tiny slaughter houses they're either really nice or they're really awful because so much depends upon the personality of that manager but if you want to improve all kinds of things not just welfare you've got to have management Buy in to doing things right okay sorry you next um you were talking about you know electric lights and how they're used to you know guide cattle forward could you have this could you have a similar effect if you just had you know one or two lights and then have a bunch of mirrors or no I don't think that's probably going to probably going to work now and there's people that have tried things like that you know where light works best is in you've got a place where they're hard to get into like in a chute if you're inside a building where the eyes of the animal are adjusted to the light I can use artificial light to attract them in that's not going to work outside the Sun 100 times brighter than any light but I can use lights at night I've had people where they couldn't get their animal loaded I said why don't to try loading the horse trailer at night put a light inside track them in at night that sometimes works really really well I've seen a lot of facilities where they horrible in the daytime they actually worked really quite well at night because then I can control things with artificial light but I'm competing against the sun I can't do that you know if I've got the black hole effect I got to get tin off I got to get light in there okay um I'm basically wondering if you've had any experience with the open air slaughterhouse facility type um farms uh polyface Farms out in Virginia they do natural pasture rotation they slaughter their own animals out of chickens outside the problem with with something like that something like that may work on a very small scale but on a large scale with turn into an absolute filthy mess you know you take like a big plant here like Hyrum they spend one whole shift cleaning it and if you were to go in that plant at midnight they they spray all this stuff it looks like a 10,000 cans of shaving cream been put in there uh things that work on a small scale often won't work when you scale it up now I think some of the things that salatin's done on pasture rotation I'm getting really interested in some of these intensive grazing things I think this is where we can really do things with Rin animals because there's so much land in this country that cannot be cropped and the only way you can grow food on that land is ruminants and things where you taking sheep and cattle together the the grazing things um I think there's things that we can learn from that and we need to be working on promoting those sort of things but I but let's say we slaughtered you know commercial amounts of chickens outside that'd be a complete mess uh because you have no way to clean it my question is is do you still horseback ride I don't now I'm I I uh my balance has gotten so bad and I I just can't hardly have trouble balancing have you found a correlation between stress and dystocia or cing problems in animals well I think that you know you know I haven't researched that thing but if the animal's scared and not relaxed around people it's not it's not going to want to C cattle have a natural tendency to hide you know when they're cing you want to hide from the Predator so if the animal is viewing its caretakers as Predators then it's not going to want a cal and that possibly could cause a problem with dystocia it's very important that animals not be afraid of the caretakers there's a scientist named Paul Hemsworth and he's been doing research for years and what he's found is animals that are afraid of their caretakers they have a big flight zone give less milk pigs have 8% less pegs they're going to be less productive you don't want to have farm animals that are afraid of their caretakers you know you go in the dairy and all the cows run to the other end of the barn that's not a good sign Dr gron I am an agricultural Communications major and I was excited to hear you talk a little bit about the message that we need to be spreading um what in your opinion are the most important messages that we can all share with the public and what's the best way to do that I think we need to just show what we do and the videos I put up on YouTube were training videos they don't say that anything's wonderful they just say okay to stun pigs correctly this is how you do it and that video has got up a million views now you are going to have to police these sites for f bombs and what I have found is there's a small amount of people that write really vulgar stuff and that you have to block and delete but I don't take down descent if somebody said be a vegan or Meets Evil I don't take that down I don't take descent down but discussion has to be civil then the other thing is when you write back never type directly on the web page that's too dangerous you type it somewhere else and then you transfer it over there the next day because you don't want to be responding back in anger but I think basically what we got to do and I think the Public's smarter than we think is just open up the house and show what we do that can be done electronically we need putting videos up like things like well this is like taking care of a cing on our Ranch and just explaining it and and what we do and you writing stuff on there well we're a family ranch we're not a big bad you know factory farm C better use those keywords because when I go on YouTube when I went on YouTube two and a half years ago I typed in cattle feed lot I got nothing but bad stuff now I type in cattle feed yard or cattle feed lot and I get normal stuff like cattle eating out of the feed bunk loaders scooping up grain now if I type in cfal I get bad stuff so we're going to have to start using that keyword but the public is actually hungry just to look at normal stuff now to us a loader scooping grain is boring but to some little eight-year-old kid a loader scooping grain is pretty cool it's we need to just show we need to open up the house electronically and to show what we do not a lot of prbs but just okay this is what we do and this is why we do it and there's some practices we better clean up and I'm getting very concerned about what I call biological system overload we're pushing a dairy cow to where she's not breeding um beef animals jacked up on so many beta agonists that they've got hoof problems they got sore feet and they got heat stress I I saw two bad cases of this this summer and the thing is really weird is if you have three truck loads of cattle it doesn't affect all the animals evenly it makes a few animals really messed up a lot of the animals appear to be okay and about 20% are going to be sore footed I got problems with that lameness feed lot cattle I didn't think we'd ever get there but we are now you see that's pushing the biology too hard you know I'll go with measuring the outcome but I don't want to see sore footed cattle and I better not see any tongues out and those mouths open up you got open mouths they're hot that's a very easy thing to score Dr grandon my son wanted to ask you a question before and he just wanted to hurry and ask that question now okay how do you focus on one thing and keep yourself from focusing on your surroundings that's very distracting well first of all you need a quiet place to do your homework away from distracting you need to put the phones away and things like that I find when I've got to do something like write a serious article I got to have block of time of at least four hours where I can just sit down and work on that article where you got to get rid of all the text messaging rid of all the distractions and you just concentrate on the thing you got to get done over here okay hi um I'm planning on becoming a Rancher when I get older and I wanted to know some tips on becoming one of the top best how to become the best Rancher yeah well I'd recommend getting out and seeing as many ranches as possible interning in the summer at different ranches travel's a great educator and I I learned some real lessons uh back when I first started I thought everything we had in Arizona was wonderful then I went to Australia and I saw some of the most beautiful meat plants I'd ever seen get out and see as much stuff as you can see the good the bad the everything in between the more stuff you see that'll help you to be a better Rancher over here Temple okay oh and then you might want to get my book Humane livestock handling you might want to get that it's called Humane livestock handling what's your favorite dog favorite dog well I really like Golden Retriever and Labradors very much right here okay I think everyone here would like to know how you like your steak cooked I like it medium rare and um I got no intention of giving up meat and people ask me how can I still be in the industry when there's things going on that are wrong and in the epilog in the afterward of animals make us human I discussed how did I manage to stay in the industry when cattle handling in the 70s was so awful because there were few people that did things right the other thing is in Arizona feed yards were not mud holes they had shade so even though the handling of cattle was really atrocious cattle handling today's gotten is getting a lot better the living conditions for those cattle were good they had shade and they weren't slogging around in the mud if the cattle back in my cattle formative years in the early 70s been slopping in this much mud maybe my career might have gone somewhere else but they weren't and I could see the handling as something that I could fix because there were some people that did things right uh one one more question I I have an idea about how to help with stereotyping I wonder if I could talk to you afterwards about that mean stereotyping about about what uh stereotyping the an that's not how you pronounce it but stereotyping with zoo animals oh oh okay well actually I addressed that issue in my book animals make us human and um one of the things we talk about is you got to look at what's motivating behavior is it fear okay if animals are having a problem during handling that's fear then I talked about seeking where they tend to approach the novelty that's an emotional system in the brain you can also have separation anxiety you you you you separate the calves and they um they have the separation distress trait you can have Rage of course you got sex you got play and you got the mother young nurturing Behavior there's emotional systems in the brain and um grazing animals tend to develop mouth stereotypies like cribbing because that's an animal that spends a lot of it life just um crazy animals that are big Seekers like the polar bear they do pacing Geral that do compulsive digging that's motivated by fear because they're trying to dig a hole to get cover from the non-existent Predators so in that situation the stereotypic behavior is driven by fear where the polar bear is driven by seeking urge and some people might say well that's not science what you're talking about but all these things on emotional systems in animals brains it's all in the Neuroscience literature see this is where different literatures don't communicate with each other because the emotional basic emotional systems like fear separation distress neuroscientists call it Panic I'm not a fan of that word because it gets mixed up with fear rage say novelty seeking and then sex play and and mother young nurturing all of that stuff's been documented thousands of papers but it's all in Neuroscience people tend to not read across disciplines one thing I've tried to do my entire career I really recommend students read across disciplines don't just read the animal science stuff read Veterinary stuff read Neuroscience stuff I get all these magazines I get science and nature and all these and read all these newspapers and all this stuff because really understand you need to get across disciplines a lot of this seems to be on confined cattle slutter houses and feed yards and whatnot what about um handling practices out in the open uh auction yards and so forth auction yards that's one of the places where we still got a lot of problems that is probably one of the worst segments of the industry you see and one of the problems you got there is they don't own the animal you know it gets sick then it's somebody else's problem we're still getting way too many cabs weaned on a truck well if a Rancher doesn't get a premium for prev vaccinating and preeing then they're not going to do it cattle that are in a dedicated supply chain those tend to get preconditioned and vaccinated vaccination 45 days prior all the things you're supposed to do but there's still a lot of babies getting wean on the trucks and there seem to be Regional differences in this there's certain regions of the country where that's still a great big problem and what happens there is you're it's a segmented market chain so then you pass that sickness onto the next segment there's somebody else's problem when they get sick of 10 days later accountability for losses when I first started I can remember Bill Fleming the editor of beef saying to me it's all in economics and they didn't believe them and I have found that you know when McDonald's came in and put the power of McDonald's Behind These audits boy things got cleaned up because a plant didn't want to get kicked off the approved s