Agriculture committee  Yes, transportation is a complicated issue, and you have to look to see where the largest risks are. The solution to journey times is to improve or optimize the quality of the journey and the management of the animals before and after the journey, so there's less need to put the

Agriculture committee  It's difficult to envisage that you can change the metabolism of a pig to decrease its water requirements. You're better off trying to work out how to provide water effectively during long-distance transport.

Agriculture committee  I look forward to seeing the peer review literature.

Agriculture committee  A lot. That's quite a difficult term for me to get to grips with, because if you deprive an animal of feed, then it will just try to mobilize its body's energy reserves. The first energy reserve it calls upon is carbohydrates, and that tends to be stored in the liver. If you loo

Agriculture committee  There's clear evidence that shows that the risk of poultry dying during transport increases linearly with the journey duration and the time without feed. We need to understand more about these relationships. There is a major issue, however, with the transport of poultry and journ

Agriculture committee  That is partly true. It's one thing that we would explore together as part of the NFACC committee on code development and science.

Agriculture committee  An “unfit“ animal is an animal that cannot legally be transported. Canada is quite unique compared to, say, the EU regulations, by having a separate category of “compromised animals”, whereby those animals are not fully fit but they are allowed to be transported under special cir

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's an interesting question. It's a challenge for a regulation to be able to cover that huge variation. Poultry are particularly susceptible to transportation due to their susceptibility to thermal extremes, whether that's a cold temperature or a hot temperature. Spent l

Agriculture committee  If the management of the animals during transport was okay, there shouldn't be the need to put so much emphasis on journey times and times off feed and water. A number of animals, as you've heard, can be transported on long journeys, if it's done well. It's not impossible to do

Agriculture committee  It's already been said. Poultry is at the greatest risk of dying during transportation. There should be very little reason why cattle die during transport. We're talking at a very sort of base level here, in terms of animal welfare, about transporting animals so you don't kill th

Agriculture committee  You need to look at the role of legislation that's in society to look at these broader aspects. It's basically to provide a framework of essential practices that the industry needs to adopt to reduce the risk of suffering. Doing that, you have commercial conformity when deliverin

Agriculture committee  I can deal with that one. The good news is that the DOA percentage in Canada for the transport of poultry has gone down quite dramatically in recent years. That shows the commitment of the industry to achieve that end. It shows that, by changing management practices, you can get

Agriculture committee  Yes. A major role of veterinarians is to assess the health and welfare of animals on a viable slaughter plan.

Agriculture committee  My understanding is that the CFIA gives these veterinarians additional training. You can never have enough training and education on this very difficult topic. Perhaps there's a need for more but they get extra specialist training in this area.

Agriculture committee  This is a question for the CFIA rather than me as an animal welfare specialist representing the CVMA.