Page 140 - The Welfare of Cattle

CattLe haVe a reasonabLY Good LIfe 117

However, some North American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have also begun
offering “certification” of animal-welfare practices resulting in “certification” audits such as SPCA
Certified (http://spca.bc.ca/programs-services/certifications-accreditation/spca-certified/), Certified
TM
Humane (http://certifiedhumane.org/), American Humane Certified www. humaneheartland.
org/our-farm-programs/american-humane-certified), Global Animal Partnership (https://global-
animalpartnership.org/), and Animal Welfare Approved (https://animalwelfareapproved.us/). The
impetus from these humane organizations to engage in developing these certification programs is
no doubt to improve farm animal welfare. However, those farmers that set out to be “certified” are
likely doing so with the added goal of obtaining a market advantage. Farms seeking certification by
one or more of these types of labels typically must pay for a third-party auditor to come and verify
whether the farm is compliant in regard to the “label claims.” To the best of our knowledge, the only
audit that has been reviewed and shown to indeed improve the welfare of animals is the NAMI audit
(see Grandin, 2011).
With the growing demand for assurance that animal-welfare standards are being met on farms,
there is a need to also determine how best to motivate farmers to adopt best practices on farms.
These include a number of human factors that pay a role in verifying cattle welfare (Fraser and
Koralesky, 2017), two of which include benchmarking and considering a professional model of
animal production.

the role of Benchmarking and Professionalism

There is a growing body of research indicating that the failure to adopt proven practices that
improve animal welfare on farms can be explained, in part, by lack of farmer awareness of the
problem. The existence of the gap between proven research and changed practices on commercial
farms work is worrisome. The failure to get research implemented into practice can be due to a
number of factors. Maybe the initial research question was not relevant to farmers? Or maybe the
scientist has just not worked hard enough to create spaces where they can dialogue with farmers
about their work and how it might be useful? Or maybe we need to develop new ways of closing the
gap between science and changed practice on farms? Some work has begun to address this issue.
For example, work done in the United Kingdom on lameness showed that this malady was greater
on farms where the farmer underestimated the extent of the problem within their herd (Leach et al.,
2010a) and that working toward reducing this problem requires a thorough understanding of the
farmers motivations (Leach et al., 2010b).
One potentially effective approach is “benchmarking” welfare relevant measures as a way of
getting farmers interested in the problems. Described by Fong et al. (1998) as the process of measur-
ing performance using specific indicators, and then comparing the performance of one peer with
other peers, benchmarking provides farmers with information on their farms but also in relation to
how they compare to their peer group (von Keyserlingk et al., 2012). Ideally this process identifies
areas of poor performance, initiates conversations, and ultimately drives improvements. Although
most commonly used as a driver of economic efficiency (Anderson and McAdam, 2004), it has also
been successfully used to motivate changes in other non-economic outcomes (Magd and Curry,
2003) such as improving the quality of patient care in human medicine (Woodhouse et al., 2009).
There is some evidence that this approach will be effective in the cattle industries, at least in the
case of some farmers, as a vehicle to motivate them to strive for changed practices resulting in bet-
ter lives for the animals on their farms (lameness, Chapinal et al., 2014b; calf feeding, Atkinson et
al., 2017; Sumner et al., 2018). As stated earlier benchmarking works because it provides the farmer
with real data from their own farm but also places this into context by comparing their results with
their farmer peer group (thus allowing the farmer to decide if the problem is worth addressing) (von
Keyserlingk et al., 2012). This approach can be done at the local, regional, or national level through
first- and second-party audits that use widely accepted standards (see Sorensen and Fraser, 2010 for