The Canadian Pork Council says changes to Canada's Pig Code of Practice will be incorporated into the animal care component of the Canadian pork industry's on farm food safety programme as part of an update of the entire programme.
In March the National Farm Animal Care Council's updated Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Pigs in Canada was made public.
Catherine Scovil, the associate executive director of the Canadian Pork Council, says over the next 18 months the animal welfare component of the Canadian Quality Assurance programme will be updated to reflect changes in the code as part of a review of the entire CQA programme.
Catherine Scovil-Canadian Pork Council:
Because the current animal care assessment elements within CQA are based on the previous code we have to update those elements to reflect the code that was released in March so there will be a group brought together to review the requirements in the code and translate those into how they can be measured or assessed on farm.
But we're also going to use the opportunity of updating the animal care assessment elements within the CQA to be updating the whole CQA programme and really rebranding it and giving it a fresh look.
This programme was originally launched in 1998 and things have changed and we've learned things throughout that process and of course these are programmes, both food safety and animal care, that are built on continual improvement so as we look to rebrand CQA we're really trying to focus on making this programme more transparent, easier to review and reflect and audit, make it more user friendly and deliver more value to producers.
Ms Scovil says, over the next 12 months, the focus will be updating content followed by testing of the programme with a targeted release in January 2016.
