Farmscape for March 10, 2025

An Alberta based animal care and livestock handling specialist says establishing an on-farm emergency response plan is all about preserving the welfare of both the animals and the farm workers.
Sask Pork is offering incentives until the end of this month to help the province's pork producers establish plans for euthanizing pigs in the event of an emergency such as an accident, to avoid the spread of disease or a market disruption.
Jennifer Woods, an animal care and livestock handling specialist with J. Woods Livestock Services, says it's all about welfare.

Quote-Jennifer Woods-J. Woods Livestock Services:
First and foremost, even in a situation of mass destruction, animal welfare has to be at the forefront.
That would involve all aspects of welfare during euthanasia, so timeliness of euthanasia, handling, the actual application of the euthanasia method itself and of course confirming that the animals have been rendered insensible and then making sure animals remain insensible until they do go on to die,, which is really important that you are not moving animals before you have confirmed death just to make sure that there is no chance of them returning to sensibility after this process.
For human welfare, and through personal experience that I have done through research on euthanasia of hogs in particular, fatigue is something we have to take into consideration with the handlers, so fatigue during handling.
With a captive bolt gun, your arm can become quite fatigued during the process and you need to be able to rotate that out but also emotional considerations.
It's a very high stress event.
Euthanizing a significant amount of animals can have an emotional toll on them and you need to check in regularly with the staff even during the process itself on the farm but for days and weeks after to make sure they're OK emotionally.

Woods encourages anyone interested in more information to reach out to Sask Pork or to her at livestockhandling.net.
For more visit Farmscape.Ca.
Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers