Earlier in August, the BBC reported the UK is phasing in rules that require video cameras in slaughter plants. Other efforts are being made to have video cameras in broiler chicken operations and layer facilities. These efforts are being made in the interest of improved animal welfare, according to English official and veterinary sources cited in the BBC piece.
As these moves are similar to recommendations made by Dr. Temple Grandin—well known for her extensive work in improving animal handling and welfare in slaughter plants—WLJ reached out to Grandin. She pointed out that the UK is going about it differently than the U.S., but that their efforts are nothing new.
“They’re making it mandatory with the meat inspectors. Our video is voluntary but big companies are all putting it in now and having it audited by outside auditing companies.”
“Making things mandated in the U.S. is harder than it is in the UK,” she added, noting the extreme difference in size of between the UK and the U.S., not to mention the American capitalistic personality.
“The big companies are all putting it in because customers are mandating it. The meat buyers are mandating it.”
She told WLJ about her experience that, after McDonald’s implemented audits of animal handling using objective measurements with its beef suppliers, things changed fast.
“I saw more change in a six-month period than I’d seen in my whole life in the 25 years prior to that. When a big customer uses the objective scoring system—where you score things like percentage of animals stunned on the first shot, percentage prodded, percentage vocalizing in the stun box, falling down, insensibility on the rail—and when we started holding them to that scoring system, things improved because now the plant knew exactly what it had to do.”
The implementation of video cameras in plants is another way of holding plants and their staff to objective, measurable standards. But there’s a catch.
“I can remember 20 years ago putting in video cameras, but when the novelty wore off, they stop looking at them,” Grandin related, speaking of processing plant operators and staff. “It’s got to be something with an outside entity doing it. … You can’t just have video cameras and have the plant manager look at it when he feels like it. That doesn’t work.”
Grandin referred to Arrowsight, a company that provides third-party remote video auditing for, among other things, processing plants.
“We’re the only ones who do this kind of a program in the processing plants,” Adam Aronson, Arrowsight’s CEO told WLJ. “There’s obviously a lot of other third-party auditing firms that send people out to the frontline. A more traditional auditing. Most of those people are using auditing programs that Dr. Grandin designed.”
Aronson estimated that 57 percent of beef production in the U.S. and Canada are in plants utilizing Arrowsight’s service. The company reviews at least 20 minutes of each shift at random. If a problem is observed, plant managers and the plant’s parent company’s corporate office gets notified.
“There’s other things to observe for besides animal welfare,” Aronson added. “We do a lot of auditing for clients ranging from food safety to productivity, biosecurity, worker safety. There’s a number of our clients that look at their own cameras for some of their own purposes, and there are other companies out there that have camera systems—that I’m aware of—that don’t use us, so they do self-monitoring.”
He reiterated Grandin’s assertion that third-party involvement is necessary.
“If you don’t have an unbiased, third-party program looking in on a random sample basis, you’re not going to get the full benefit of using those camera systems to assess and manage risk.”
Frustrated by the unfamiliar
“Things have just gotten so much better,” said Grandin, describing her experience of cattle handling in slaughter plants in the ’80s and ’90s as “terrible” and “disgusting.”
“The thing that’s frustrating is that it’s gotten better, but nobody knows about it.”
When asked about this lack of familiarity with efforts at handling improvements and tools such as video auditing programs, Aronson had this to say:
“It did get talked about a fair amount when it first happened, back in 2008-2010. Cargill and then JBS rolled it out to all their facilities,” he said, highlighting the impact those companies have on beef production.
“It was talked about in that two- to three-year window and then once it was an established program, there wasn’t much to talk about. Those companies have been using our programs in an effort to reduce the risk of any kind of animal mishandling,” he added, reporting later that, “Most of our clients have achieved 95 [percent or higher] compliance on their defined animal handling guidelines.”
Grandin opined that the improvements in animal handling in processing plants have been due to auditing programs with measurable standards. These not only encompass her own work, but also programs like the Beef Quality Assurance.
“The Beef Quality Assurance has the objective scoring system for measuring handling in the feed yards and people are basically doing it,” she said. “I think another thing that’s enforcing handling is that every phone is a video camera now. I think that has something to do with it too now. When I first started with McDonald’s 20 years ago, every phone wasn’t a video camera then.”
“When you’re being watched, you behave,” she summarized.
