This document discusses various topics relating to farm animal welfare, including methods of slaughter, welfare policies, and factors that influence an animal's ability to flourish. It examines concepts such as the five freedoms, negative animal states, and mechanisms that can inhibit an animal's normal functions. Graphs and data are presented on topics like injury levels in sows, mortality risk after farrowing, and causes of sow death. The document emphasizes that improving welfare requires addressing both averages and outliers, and that caring for animals properly involves skill, patience and humility.

1. Connecting the Dots:
Health, Well-Being
& Productivity
John Deen
College of Veterinary Medicine

4. • Humane Methods of Slaughter Act 1978
• extended the 1958 policy to all Federally inspected
slaughter plants
• Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)
enforces the Act
• veterinarian and inspectors present

6. Committees…
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
AASV
NPB
PAACO
CFI
ACAW
AVMA
AAA
FAO
Validus

7. Certified Big
Red Apple
“For Large Animal Enrichment
Scented for swine and stall animals’
pleasure”

8. Three points
• Welfare is about pigs and not PR
• Ethics are personal not institutional
• Caregivers are the experts

11. Welfare is a classic economic
problem:
• Addressing unlimited demand with a very
restricted amount of resources
• Is it a profit maximization model with specific
welfare constraints?
• Is it an optimization model with values placed
on welfare?
• Is it a marketing problem?

13. Welfare policy
• The efficient allocation of scarce resources to a
population
– Implicitly, some or all desired outcomes will not be
maximized
– Usually modeled across one species
– Multiple species and needs create a difficult problem to
solve

14. Who administers welfare policy?
•
•
•
•
Government
NGO’s
Marketing chains
Farmers
• Do we improve welfare by
moving the average or
addressing outliers?

19. Five freedoms (FAWC- UK- 1993)
Freedom from hunger
and thirst
Freedom from
discomfort
by providing ready access to fresh water
and a diet to maintain full health and
vigor
by providing an appropriate environment
including shelter and a comfortable
resting area
Freedom from pain,
by prevention or rapid diagnosis and
injury or disease
treatment
Freedom to express
by providing sufficient space, proper
normal behavior
facilities and company of the animal's
own kind
Freedom from fear and by ensuring conditions and treatments,
distress
which avoid mental suffering

20. Negative states
Thirst
Hunger
Malnutrition (predisposition) Hunger, Malaise
Discomfort
Pain
Injury (predisposition) Pain
Disease (predisposition) Malaise
To express Normal Behavior Boredom (?)
Fear
Distress
Are they signals?

21. Are Flourishing Animals Fine?
1. Yes – if they are functioning well
(the performance axiom (Stan Curtis))
2. Yes – feelings are designed to ensure
proper function
(evolutionary biology)
3. Maybe… but is it natural (right)
(teleology and ontology)

22. Four Functions to Flourish
• Feed – take in adequate nutrition
• Fight – compete and adapt in difficult
conditions (disease, heat etc)
• Flight – avoid difficult adverse conditions
• Reproduction – replacement

23. Failure to Flourish
•
•
•
•
Feed intake/absorption inadequate
Inability to adapt to adverse conditions
Inability to avoid adverse conditions
Inability to reproduce
•
• Inhibitions:
•
Physical
•
Environmental
•
Infectious
•
Other pigs
•

24. What are the mechanisms of
functional inhibition?
• Physical
– Inability or reluctance to move or position body to
eat, reproduce etc
• Inflammatory
– Inhibition of appetite, reproduction, and
competition
• Pain
– Behavioral inhibition of competing function

27. Ballerina’s are tough!
Courtesy Zinpro Performance Minerals

31. The Flaw of Averages

32. Proposed path model for sow retention
Low productivity
OR =2 .7
OR = 1.0
OR = 2.3
Lameness
Should be culled
OR =3.1

33. Sensitivity and specificity of detecting tail ender in nursery using
different weaning weight cut off
Sensit
Specif
100
90
80
%
70
60
50
40
30
20
7
8
9
Weight cut-off
10
11

34. Injury levels in vulva of sows in pens with
ESF at different stages of gestation
60
Percentage
50
40
No injury
Slight injury
30
Obvious injury
20
Severe injury
10
0
First Second Day 28
mixing mixing
Day 56
Day in the pen
Day 84 Day 108

35. P r o p o r tio n o f M o r ta lity ( % )
Risk post farrowing
20
15
10
5
0
0
15 30 45 60 75 90 105 120 135 150 165 180
Days after farrowing

36. Percentage
Percentage of death and euthanasia among sows
and gilts (dead & destroyed) based on the day of
removal.
26
24
22
20
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Sow-Euthanasia
Sow-Death
Gilt-Euthanasia
Gilt-Death
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat

38. Aristotle: A Good Narrative
• Logos is appeal based on logic or reason.
• Ethos is appeal based on the character of
the speaker.
• Pathos is appeal based on emotion.
– HL Green: The three types of persuasion, if you
are a classically trained orator, are ethos,
pathos, and logos. If your training was obtained
in modern times, you have an additional toolstatistics.

40. “It is comfortingly easy to care
about animals:
to care for them requires skill,
patience, and humility”
(John Webster)