Applying the golden rule to raising livestock

Saturday, November 2, 2013

'When trust is lost, there are consequences,' says the director of stewardship for a major American dairy company. The message to consumers has to be that 'we take care of our cows because that is the right thing to do, period'

by DON STONEMAN


The old argument that "I must be taking good care of my cows or they wouldn't produce" is archaic and doesn't cut it anymore in a society where consumers have expanded their moral circle to include farm animals, says the director of dairy stewardship for Dean Foods Company.

Dr. Jennifer Walker is a former private practitioner who has worked with Dallas-based Dean Foods since 2009. Her job includes visiting farms ranging from 50-cow Mennonite herds in Pennsylvania to 16,000-cow herds in California, offering advice on how to improve animal welfare and making sure that farmers are operating up to a standard.

Lameness remains a huge issue in the dairy industry, Walker says. "I know that, at any given time, 20 to 30 per cent of cows are lame." She monitors farmers to see that they are making improvements. "When you have a US$6 billion brand on the line, I'm not going to leave it up to trust and a handshake," Walker told a group of pork producers and industry people in Shakespeare recently.

Dean bottles milk in 32 states, selling to consumers who are far from the source of their food, suspicious of big business and ever-larger farms and, most recently, dubious that what farmers are doing "isn't really farming anymore."

A key concern is keeping consumers' trust. "Many consumers have expanded their moral circle to include farm animals," Walker says. The golden rule – treat others as you would like to be treated – has been extended to include animals as well as humans. Farmers have "moved from having a social contract with the farm animals we benefit from to trying to maintain the social license with consumers who benefit from animals in agriculture."

When there is an exposé on YouTube or in the media of a dairy operation where animals have been abused, consumers call, seeking assurances that the operation is not a supplier of milk for Dean. "They not only expect us to fix the problems, they expect us to stop them from happening in the first place," says Walker. While farmers may expect Dean to defend them, Walker says she can't tell consumers that all is right on farms if it is not.  "When trust is lost, there are consequences," she says. "We have to protect our license to operate."

Consumers hold conflicting views about modern agriculture, Walker says. "While many people link farming with stewardship, they simultaneously characterize us as profit-mongers when associated with large farms . . . We are accused of being cruel when we are seen to be approaching farming as a business rather than a way of life."

She argues that "the foundation of consumer trust is believing that the system is ethically grounded and shares core values about how animals are treated." She describes those core values as "compassion and simply doing the right thing" and adds that "the historical message, 'of course we care for our cows. If we didn't, they wouldn't produce,' doesn't work anymore. The alternative to that message tells people that if we didn't care for our cows and they still produced, we would do that, too. The message to consumers has to be that we take care of our cows because that is the right thing to do, period."

In her view, animal welfare is "about more than science. It is about more than economics. While good animal care is not science-based, it can be informed by science." Animal welfare should be top of mind for all veterinarians and farmers, yet it is only recently that welfare has even been addressed in veterinary colleges.

Walker says producers on both sides of the border are still shipping cull cows to meat markets when they should not have been shipped. When making a decision to ship or euthanize cull cows, Walker says producers need to ask themselves "how long does she have to ride on the trailer to make it to the sales barn? If she made it to the sales barn, how long is the ride to the slaughterhouse? If she gets there and she has to be euthanized on the trailer because she can't get up, can we really say to the consumer today that we did the right thing? We owe them a good life and we owe them a good death."

The rules on good welfare are changing, Walker believes. Tail docking is now deemed an unacceptable practice. It is banned now in California and is being phased out in Ohio.

Crystal Mackay, executive director of Farm & Food Care Ontario (F&FC), agrees with Walker's premise that the golden rule counts. However, she says surveys in Canada show different results. An Ipsos Marketing study for Farm & Food Care in September 2012 found that animal welfare was at the bottom of a list of five attributes ranked by consumers. From the top, in order, were food safety, overall health of Canadians, affordability and then the Canadian environment. It's only a small percentage that rank animal welfare first and Mackay says F&FC uses the Ipsos survey results to point that out to retailers.

Canadian consumers "recognize we need safe affordable food first and only then are they concerned about the environment and then animal welfare," Mackay says. BF