USA TODAY August 12th 2003

Food sellers push animal welfare - By Elizabeth Weise

The United States is dramatically improving the quality of the lives — and the humaneness of the deaths — of the cows, pigs and chickens that we eat. (Related item: Prodding slaughterhouses <http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-08-12-animals-side-usat_x.htm> )
Experts say this increased concern for animal welfare over the past five years is nothing short of remarkable. But what makes it even more remarkable is that this push for more humane care is coming from the folks with the economic clout to make producers sit up and take notice — supermarkets and fast food restaurants.

And they are continuing a reform trend started by perhaps the world's most famous purveyor of beef — McDonald's. The period from 1999 to 2002 was a "watershed" in animal welfare worldwide, says David Fraser, a professor of animal behavior and welfare at the University of British Columbia in Canada. "It was as if a crucial mass had been reached and animal welfare and assurance programs became the thing to do," he says.

"If you're Mr. Chicken Grower you better pay attention because your biggest customers are going to be asking you tomorrow what you're doing to insure your chickens are being handled humanely," says Terrie Dort, president of the National Council of Chain Restaurants.

This is an enormous change that's permeating the industry, says Dort. "When you put together my companies and the grocery story chains that are represented by (the Food Marketing Institute), I don't know that there's anybody left. If you're not selling to one of these big companies, who the hell are you selling to?"

Among the reforms in place:

More than half of beef cattle in North America meet their end at slaughterhouses based on innovative designs that consider the fears and inclinations of these herd animals. No more cattle prods.

The cages of laying hens are almost a third larger than the old ones. The sometimes weeks-long starvation that stimulates renewed egg production is beginning to be phased out.

Last November, voters in Florida passed a measure outlawing sow stalls, where pregnant pigs are confined in stalls typically two feet wide and seven feet long. This gives producers a convenient way to feed the animals individually and avoiding overfeeding, but also keeps the sow from being able to turn around or walk for much of her 115-day pregnancy. Nationally, supermarket and fast food chains are saying they might not buy from pork producers who do not end this practice.

Perhaps most importantly, objective, measurable standards are being put in place in the slaughterhouse to ensure that cattle, swine and chickens meet their ends in a much more painless and calm manner than in the past.

In cattle, that means that no more than three out of 100 animals at the processing plant can be mooing, a sign of distress. At slaughter, 95 out of 100 must be stunned on the first try and every last one must be insensible when slaughtered. In swine, the electric stunner has to be correctly placed on 99 out of 100 of the animals on the first try and all must be insensible when slaughtered. In chickens, stunning must be effective in a minimum of 98 of 100 birds.

The retail initiative

In a groundbreaking program started with little fanfare in 2001, the FMI and the NCCR launched an animal welfare initiative. The organizations asked respected animal welfare academics to review the current animal handling standards of industry groups, including the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the American Meat Institute, the Milk & Dairy Beef Quality Assurance Center, the National Milk Producers Federation, the National Chicken Council, the National Pork Board, the National Turkey Federation and the United Egg Producers.

After months — and sometimes years — of back and forth, the review group has crafted animal welfare guidelines for the slaughter of cattle, swine, sheep and goats as well as for egg, milk and chicken production. Guidelines for swine and beef handling are under review.

For the most part, the FMI-NCCR guidelines are based upon industry guidelines that have already undergone several years of reform. But in some cases the academics were stricter. For example, the FMI-NCCR guidelines don't allow tail docking in dairy cattle; they require the phasing out of sow stalls; and they require that broiler chickens have more room than required by the National Chicken Council.

Audits will start taking place of egg, milk and chicken producers this summer. Pork producers will be audited shortly thereafter. The inspection of cattle and feedlots will come when discussions with the National Cattleman's Beef Association are finalized.

Some criticize the Animal Welfare Audit Program because it's voluntary and purchasers can ignore the results if they wish. But proponents say it's likely that larger chains will simply require that all their suppliers follow the guidelines across the board.

And it's remarkable in that for the first time "food retailers who are at one end of the chain are actually talking to the people whose animals produce the product," says Janice Swanson,. a professor of animal sciences and industry at Kansas State University, who also sits on the FMI/NCCR animal welfare advisory committee.
But FMI/NCCR wasn't the first to carry the animal-welfare banner.

The Mac attack

In 1997, McDonald's began a process that resulted in a requirement that all its meat producers undergo animal welfare audits using a system created by the legendary animal behaviorist Temple Grandin.

Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University who has done groundbreaking work on the behavioral principles of livestock handling to alleviate animal pain and suffering at the slaughterhouse.

That same year the United Egg Producers created an all-star academic panel to create welfare guidelines for laying hens.

Pressure from animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals provided some momentum. There were highly publicized campaigns against the food industry, causing concern among producers that consumers, especially the all-important children and teen market, might stop eating meat.

All this was happening at a time when the way farm animals were treated in the USA had gotten about as bad as it could get under the relentless pressure to produce food more cheaply.

This trend began after World War II when federal policies encouraged the scientific management of agriculture to produce cheap food for a growing population, says Debbie Cherney, an animal scientist t Cornell University. Called "production"or "intensive" agriculture, these techniques have allowed the price of food in the USA to actually drop. In 1930, American families spent $24 of every $100 on food. In 2001 that number was only $10, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This was possible by removing inefficiencies and introducing technology. Pigs and chickens were moved inside to larger confined feeding operations, which enjoyed greater economies of scale. Animal scientists worked out exactly how much space each chicken needed — for broilers as little as eight and a half pounds of chicken per square foot. New strains were bred that gained weight rapidly, so rapidly that their skeletons couldn't always keep up, causing leg problems and lameness. Today chickens reach market weight in roughly six weeks, down from 12 weeks in 1950, and require significantly less feed to do it.

For laying hens, space allotments got down to 48 square inches, about the size of half a sheet of copier paper. In close quarters, some breeds pecked and scratched each other, so their toes were trimmed and up to a third of their beaks cut off. Forced molting, a period of starvation from four to 24 days, became the norm to stimulate higher egg production.

Grandin refers to the 1980s as "the bad old days" in animal welfare. "We've forgotten that we're breeding animals,"she says. "When you breed for feed conversion, you tend to breed a flighty, excitable animal, a very high-fear animal. You breed a calmer chicken, she's going to need more feed but she's not going to peck others to death."

By the mid-1990s it was becoming clear to everyone — academics, breeders, producers and animal rights activists alike — that something had gone wrong with the process. Profit margins were so slim that producers were going out of business, animals were suffering and the public was beginning to pay attention to how their meat and eggs were being raised.

The sea change begins

It was at this point that several things suddenly crystallized. The U.S. Department of Agriculture asked Grandin to survey slaughterhouses to see how well the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958 — the only federal law covering farm animal welfare — was working. What she found was shocking. Only 30 out of 100 plants were able to stun 95% of the cattle on the first try.

At about the same time McDonald's was meeting with Henry Spira. of Animal Rights International, who helped limit the use of animals in medical testing in the 1970s. Spira, who died in 1998, was a moderate who advocated working with producers.

"We're very practical. We were looking to see what we could do as purchasers," says the company's director for social responsibility Bob Langert. "He told us we should talk to Temple Grandin."
Working with Grandin, McDonald's launched welfare standards that began with beef cattle and later grew to encompass pigs as well as broiler and laying chickens.

They required that McDonald's' suppliers follow strict guidelines measurable by simple counts of such things as how many cows are mooing or how many pigs at a slaughterhouse were stunned on the first try. These animal welfare audits for the first time allowed a precise measurement of a how well a plant was doing and how it stacked up against the industry as a whole.

In 1999 McDonald's conducted 100 audits in the USA. In 2002 it did 500 worldwide. Because the company is such a large purchaser, it pushed the entire industry to change because no one could afford a McDonald's boycott.

First cows, then chickens

The same year McDonald's was beginning to look at cattle, the United Egg Producers asked Jeffrey Armstrong, then of Purdue University, address issues being raised by activists opposed to the use of closely packed "battery" cages for laying hens.

Armstrong pulled together an all-star group of academics to craft welfare guidelines that were better for the chickens and not ruinous to the industry.

That two-year process resulted in the first industry-group animal welfare guidelines in 1999. McDonald's adopted them, then Burger King. They were later incorporated into the FMI/NCCR guidelines.

Take the example of space. The group found that if the space allowed each hen was increased from the standard 48 to 54 square inches to between 67 and 86 square inches, fewer hens died and they laid more eggs. But the cost per egg increased slightly.

Once egg buyers at McDonald's and soon Burger King began requiring that their producers adhere to the new UEP guidelines, the entire industry fell in line. "Now 80% of the birds in the country are being raised under the guidelines," says Armstrong, who is now dean of the Michigan State University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The consumers' role In the end, experts say, better conditions for animals are up to consumers.

"The consuming public has to understand that what you are willing to pay in a grocery story does have impact on the lives of these animals,"says Kansas State's Swanson. If consumers just buy what's cheapest, there's not only no incentive but no economic possibility that producers can make improvements, she says.

But there clearly is consumer concern for animal welfare, as witnessed by the burgeoning market for organic, free-range and "natural"meat, eggs and poultry.

This spring the Certified Humane program created a gold standard for animal welfare. The program audits producers according to some of the strictest animal welfare criteria in the USA. Called Humane Farm Animal Care, it's a certification program that covers beef and dairy cattle, pigs and laying and broiler chickens.

"I really believe the only way to change the way animals are treated is through the marketplace," says founder Adele Douglass. The Certified Humane labels will start to appear in supermarkets around the country this fall. Douglass admits that it's more expensive, but believes many consumers are willing to spend "a little bit more for food if it means they animals have been raised right."

There's still a long way to go towards bettering the lives of farm animals in this country, say animal rights activists. For example People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which believes humans have no business killing, eating or otherwise interfering in animals' lives, isn't letting up on its campaigns in the least.

"We just don't want people to think that what the industry is doing is eliminating the cruelty. It's clearly not," says PETA's Bruce Friedrich. "We are not opposing the progress, but are simply pointing out a lot of abuse that remains — i.e.: gestation crates, battery cages, mutilations without pain relief — all of which would put people in jail were dogs or cats treated similarly." Battery cages are rows and tiers of wire cages with floors that slope.

And even the highest U.S. standards don't match European Union animal welfare guidelines set to take effect in 2012 which require the phasing out of battery cages for laying hens and the institution of "enriched" cages a third again larger than current U.S. standards.
The cages would also include a perch "because it's natural for the birds to perch at night," says Canada's Fraser. "It's good for their leg bone strength. It's also got to have a nest box where they can retreat to lay their eggs and it has to have some form of litter which the birds use for their natural dust-bathing behavior."

But while we're a long way from the European directive that in 2013 will require toys for pigs — the most intelligent of all farm animals — Michigan State's Armstrong says programs like the FMI/NCCR and Certified Humane still signal an important change.

"In agriculture, we've always said, 'We will grow it and you will eat it.' What we' re doing now is saying, 'What do you want to eat and we'll grow it?' I think that's the future."