Farmscape for June 28, 2006  (Episode 2178)

The Manitoba Farm Animal Council says a new national communications initiative offers a proactive approach to getting animal welfare on the national agenda.

The farm animal councils in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the national council have kicked of a three year initiative designed to put animal welfare on the agenda.

The project features the development of a database of animal welfare experts who can address meetings, seminars and other public events, enhanced communications including newspaper and magazine articles, radio advertising and a livestockwelfare.com web site and animal handling and training workshops targeting primarily youth and livestock transporters.

Manitoba Farm Animal Council executive director Shanyn Silinski says the goal is to boost the awareness of farm animal welfare research and issues.

Clip-Shanyn Silinski-Manitoba Farm Animal Council 

Anybody that is involved with animal agriculture is involved with animal welfare and our position is that we want to make sure that farmers veterinarians interested consumers, youth that are in 4 H or college students, people who are transporting livestock, anybody that is involved with animal agriculture we would like to target them so that they have access to updated information, research and they can share their information with people across the board.

Historically in agriculture animal welfare issues seldom become a part of the agenda until there's a problem and what we want to do is be more proactive rather than reactive and make sure that animal welfare is on the agenda without a crisis accompanying it so that we can be utilizing the positive research and the new data and the information that are coming from all of the excellent people in the field and get it out to the producers, to the consumers and to people in support industries as well.

Silinski notes the more knowledge you have, the more choices you have available for decision making and this initiative is designed to increase access to information and expand that base of knowledge.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council