You are familiar with our Principle on Animal Health & Welfare and our goal to provide cattle with good quality of life and an environment where they can thrive. As such, we have recognised animal welfare as being one of the key areas of sustainability for the beef industry. Not only is welfare a key issue for the ethics, and the societal acceptance of beef production, but it is instrumental in other aspects of sustainability, including the use of natural resources, emissions and efficiency.
In both our P&C and our Goal, we reference the World Organisation for Animal Health's terrestrial code for beef cattle welfare. WOAH is the global organisation for animal health and welfare. The range of cattle production systems is enormous, and it is a serious challenge to account for the variety of environments and systems in any standard or code.
Take for example the Welfare Quality® Assessment protocol for cattle from Europe. It has a range of animal based assessment measures that are applicable to the sorts of systems that you are likely to find in Europe, with particular reference to items such as housing that may not be of relevance in other regions.
While animal based measures are the most direct way to determine welfare, they do require direct observation and even with sampling methodologies such as Welfare Quality® Assessment. This presents a challenge to move to scale. A combination of animal and resource based measures presents a way to set and measure targets.
We know, for example, that transport and handling are stressful for cattle, leading to compromised immunity. Both preconditioning and personnel training can improve outcomes. We also know that the adoption of pain mitigation improves outcomes for cattle undergoing painful procedures such as castration or dehorning.
The adoption of pain mitigation (anaesthetics or analgesics) for painful procedures is a clear positive action that those handling cattle can take. The Australian Beef Sustainability Framework, in line with the national red meat industry, aspires to 100% use of pain relief in unavoidable aversive procedures by 2030. Similarly, the European Roundtable on Beef Sustainability has a target for the use of pain relief for all surgical procedures, and all forms of castration, dehorning and disbudding.
The Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef also has set a target to utilise practices that support animal welfare such as breed selection, polled (no horned) animals and pain relief. The challenge is that not all countries have registered products for pain mitigation in cattle. The US has no products for on-label use in cattle. The USRSB has a target that cow calf operations, transporters and lot feeders have BQA certification.
A logical alternative to the pain of dehorning is to breed polled cattle, and while this cannot be achieved overnight, and may not be an option for everyone, AACo in Australia has set a target to introduce the poll gene throughout their herd, and has already reached 25%. At the same time, AACo is working with key industry partners to develop an internationally recognised AHW certification standard for extensive beef production by 2024.
We are looking forward to hearing some more practical examples of things being done in different countries to improve welfare in our webinar, Demonstrated Advances in Cattle Welfare, on the 23rd March (24th for Australia and New Zealand).
