The Visual, Auditory, and Physical Environment of Livestock Handling Facilities and Its Effect on Ease of Movement of Cattle, Pigs, and Sheep

The visual, auditory, and physical environment livestock are handled in will have an effect on the ease of movement through races and corrals that are used for veterinary treatment, loading trucks or at slaughter houses. When livestock refuse to move easily through a handling facility, people are more likely to use electric goads (prods) or other aversive methods to move them forward. This is a major animal welfare concern. Modification of the environment can improve livestock movement and reduce aversive handling methods. In existing facilities used for handling cattle, pigs or sheep, simple changes such as, adding a light to a dark race entrance or reducing loud intermittent noise may improve livestock movement. Eliminating distractions such as, a noisy truck near a lairage can also facilitate cattle movement and reduce stopping or turning back. In an outdoor facility, sharp shadows on the floor were more likely to be associated with cattle stopping compared to no shadows or soft faint shadows. The installation of small solid walls to prevent approaching animals from seeing either moving equipment, vehicles or people in front of them may also improve forward livestock movement. Non-slip flooring is essential to prevent slipping and falling during handling. Rebuilding or completely redesigning an existing facility is often not required. Outcome based indicators should be used to assess continuous improvements in handling. Some of the commonly used measurable of handling are slipping and falling, stopping, turning back, vocalization during handling and electric prod use. Collecting data both before and after an environmental modification can be used to determine its effectiveness.

Optimal Flow—A Pilot Study Balancing Sheep Movement and Welfare in Abattoirs

Abattoirs are faced with the challenge of moving livestock efficiently through the plant, while also engaging in handling practices that assure good animal welfare. Achieving optimal outcomes for both of these goals can bring them into conflict. An additional source of conflict can arise from the design of the abattoir. These problems are compounded by the dearth of research available to inform how livestock should be handled to achieve all of these goals. We applied the concept of ‘Optimal Flow’ to describe conditions under which rate of movement is maximised while overt signs of distress in sheep are minimised. Effectively, this represents the point at which trade-offs between speed and welfare converge. The current pilot study examined the behavioural interactions between humans (n = 5), livestock herding dogs (n = 7), and sheep (n = 3235) in a large Australian abattoir to describe the factors associated with an increase or decrease in rate of sheep movement per minute. It revealed that distress behaviours in sheep were associated with dog presence and with a decrease in livestock movement rate. However, we found that as sheep density increased, there was increased livestock movement rate as well as an elevated incidence of distress behaviours. Optimal Flow at this abattoir was achieved by maintaining sheep at lower densities. Our report discusses the possible confounds in this interpretation.

Animal movement in pastoralist populations and implications for pathogen spread and control

Infectious diseases are one of the most important constraints to livestock agriculture, and hence food, nutritional and economic security in developing countries. In any livestock system, the movement of animals is key to production and sustainability. This is especially true in pastoralist systems where animal movement occurs for a myriad of social, ecological, economic and management reasons. Understanding the dynamics of livestock movement within an ecosystem is important for disease surveillance and control, yet there is limited data available on the dynamics of animal movement in such populations. The aim of this study was to investigate animal transfer networks in a pastoralist community in Kenya, and assess network-based strategies for disease control. We used network analysis to characterize five types of animal transfer networks and evaluated implications of these networks for disease control through quantifying topological changes in the network because of targeted or random removal of nodes. To construct these networks, data were collected using a standardized questionnaire (N=164 households) from communities living within the Maasai Mara Ecosystem in southwestern Kenya. The median livestock movement distance for agistment (dry season grazing) was 39.49 kilometers (22.03-63.49 km), while that for gift, bride price, buying and selling were 13.97 km (0-40.30 km), 30.75 km (10.02-66.03 km), 31.14 km (17.56-59.08 km), and 33.21 km (17.78-58.49 km), respectively. Our analyses show that the Maasai Mara National Reserve, a protected area, was critical for maintaining connectivity in the agistment network. In addition, villages closer to the Maasai Mara National Reserve were regularly used for dry season grazing. In terms of disease control, targeted removal of highly connected village nodes was more effective at fragmenting each network than random removal of nodes, indicating that network-based targeting of interventions such as vaccination could potentially disrupt transmission pathways and reduce pathogen circulation in the ecosystem. In conclusion, this work shows that animal movements have the potential to shape patterns of disease transmission and control in this ecosystem. Further, we show that targeted control is a more practical and efficient measure for disease control.