Temple Grandin: Animal Welfare Begins on the Farm #animalwelfare January 13, 2015 SAN DIEGO—The big issues of animal welfare today are on the farm, not in the slaughterhouse, famed animal-care expert Temple Grandin told the American Farm Bureau Federation here Sunday as she accepted an award for her contributions to American agriculture. Problems I am seeing at the packing plant, the slaughterhouse, I am going to have to fix at the farm. Grandin said, adding that she was referring to phenomena such as lame dairy cows brought to slaughter and laying hens with osteoporosis, an indication they had been forced to produce too many eggs. Grandins statement may reset the animal-welfare agenda that has long focused on how food animals are killed and processed, but even she acknowledged that addressing problems on the nations thousands of farms and ranches will be daunting. Grandin told National Journal after her speech that there is no way to monitor every ranch and farm. But she has already told retailers that she believes they could conduct random audits of farms and ranches that would stop some of the egregious practices she is seeing. Grandin said she hopes to avoid government regulation. Activists are bound to use her words to call for more regulation. One thing is certain: Grandin cannot be ignored. She is an unusual figure in the world of agriculture—a professor of animal science at Colorado State University but world famous due to a Hollywood movie that documented her struggle with autism and its impact on her relationship with animals. Born in 1947, Grandin was diagnosed with autism at the age of 2, but carefully educated. She became interested in animals when she attended a boarding school in New England that had a dairy, and at 15 she began spending time on her aunts ranch in Arizona. Her primarily visual way of thinking gave her a special ability to observe animals and what behaviors bothered them. In the 1990s, after animal-welfare activists targeted major corporations over the ways animals were treated in slaughterhouses, McDonalds and other companies hired her to figure out how to monitor the slaughterhouses and improve their practices. nationaljournal/outside-influences/temple-grandin-animal-welfare-begins-on-the-farm-20150113
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 02:23:48 +0000