A friend recently asked that we write something about “Animal Welfare Approved” (I’ll call it AWA), a certification that has begun to appear around the region. I had seen their certificate at Hilltown Pork, the Canaan facility where most of our cattle, lambs and pigs are slaughtered. Although I didn’t know exactly what it stood for, seeing the certificate in the office sure made me feel better about taking the animals in. So I liked the idea of investigating what it is all about. Peter and I have very different views about certifications, rules, and prescriptive guidelines. Peter has an ingrained aversion to them. Where agricultural certifications are concerned, his deep skepticism derives in part from going to a workshop several years back of the New England Heritage Breeds Association, where about 10 local pig growers were trying to agree on pig-raising protocols, only to find that while they were all working for the same aims—organic, humane, sustainable, etc.—they each had developed by trial and error quite individual ways of doing things and simply could not reach consensus on one standardized path. Peter had no doubt that each was doing the right thing in his or her own way and came away thinking that the effort to standardize a protocol was futile
His suspicion of detailed sets of prescriptive rules was deepened, as all of ours has been, by government regulation of the term "organic," which permits organic certification of industrial scale agriculture, the kind that uses intensive inputs and is not necessarily kind to animals or workers. As a lawyer who grew up a “good boy,” I always want to know what rule I am supposed to follow. In fact, I seek them out, and sometimes follow them at the expense of the broader principles they were created to advance. In this way, I am more like the Turks Peter describes, who follow the letter of the law, rather than its spirit. Since the Koran says of alcohol, “Let not the first drop touch your lips,” many Turks dip their fingers in their drinks to flick the first drop to the ground, then heartily down the rest. Peter is a spiritual person of pantheistic bent; whereas, I have a more Talmudic leaning. So, for me, going to the Animal Welfare Approved website was, you should excuse the expression, Talmudic hog heaven. Boy, were there rules. Dozens of them. And naturally the questions arise: Are these the right rules? Were they formulated by people who understand the challenges of farming? Were they adopted for the right reasons? I’ve concluded that the last question can easily be answered. Yes, the rules were adopted for the right reasons. This is not a government program aimed at enabling big corporations to consolidate their market positions. Nor do they appear to have the secret agenda of eliminating the raising of animals for food. A long-standing national non-profit organization, the Animal Welfare Institute seems to be acting from good motives. They appear to be intimately familiar with what happens on farms and seem to understand many of the challenges farmers face.
The Animal Welfare Institute created the AWA program of farm certification to allow consumers who patronize certified producers to be sure they are eating humanely raised food. Which should, in turn, promote farm animal welfare. With few exceptions, the AWI will only certify family farms, and, of those, only those where the family members themselves provides the bulk of the labor and have daily contact with the animals. They emphasize small scale (limiting the size of flocks, for example), pasture-raising of breeds that are appropriate to the farm’s climate. They require that animals be given meaningful access to light, space, shelter, heat, food, bedding, water and social life. All these general concerns are absolutely appropriate and sensible. The program has endorsers such as the revered Michael Pollan (left), Pig Perfect author Peter Kaminsky, and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. It passes muster for good intentions and integrity. And at first blush, the certification process seems reasonably simple. Certification is by species, so a farm could, for instance, be certified for sheep but not for chickens. The farmer answers a few basic questions about the breed he raises, where the breeding stock comes from, how they are raised and certifies that the farm complies with the detailed set of rules for that animal.. The AWI then sends an inspector who audits the farm operations and, if it passes, proclaims the farm Animal Welfare Certified. Unfortunately AWA will only certify species native to North America, so our guinea fowl, native to Africa, are not eligible. Also, they will not certify breeds that have undergone genetic selection to the point that their welfare is negatively affected. It's not clear to me whether certain heritage breeds, like our American Karakul sheep (the product of selective interbreeding of Central Asian Karakul and Navajo churro) would be prohibited.
It’s when I got to the specific rules, which are quite detailed, that I developed some uncertainty. As we currently operate, we probably are already in compliance with 90 to 95% of them, but that last 5 - 10% may go farther than we do. For example, in their night time sleeping porch, our turkeys perch on round, steel bars, similar to the round apple branches they perch on during the day. The AWA rules for turkeys require flat perching bars with rounded bottoms. That configuration would require that they be made of wood, and we wonder if wooden bars could even sustain the weight of our flock as they mature, since their weight already challenges the metal bars. The emphatic insistence of the rule makes me want to investigate. Maybe we should switch. But we have never had a problem with the convenient, screw-in round perching bars that we’ve been using for years, and it’s hard to imagine that we are adversely affecting our turkeys’ welfare by using them, since wild birds worldwide seem to gravitate to the rounded perches man and nature provide. There's also a question about the proper time to castrate. We castrate our piglets as soon as their mothers will let us near them. Our vet does it, and the piglets generally do not seem traumatized by the experience. (They seem more disturbed by being picked up off the ground than by the surgery.) Our “Small Scale Pig Raising” book suggests castrating four or five days before weaning—when the piglets are several weeks old. But the AWA standards for pig castration require that it never be done later than the first week of life. Since sows are ferociously protective of their newborns, we doubt the wisdom of this strict rule. And since, at Turkana, farmer welfare is equal with that of our animals, we don’t relish getting attacked by an angry, protective sow, while invading her hut to retrieve her piglets. Sometimes, to prevent an explosion of rodents in the barn and chicken coop, we resort to rat poison But such is AWA’s dedication to the welfare of all animals that they prohibit using poison. The only permissible rat control method on certified farms is catching them in live traps (like Hav-a-hearts), followed by a painless, instantaneous death. While I’d be happy to have a humane rat slaughtering operation nearby, I’m not sure I’m ready to operate one myself. Peter jokes that it only makes sense if we’re to eat the rats ourselves or market them. Many of the AWA rules are obvious imperatives to anyone aspiring to humane animal raising. Others are not as obvious, but when I read some of them I thought to myself, “We really should be doing that.” The rules serve as a valuable template for how we might be more humane. And I’m sure that any facilities in the area with the certification—there seem to be at least half a dozen farms in the region that have it (for a list visit Animal Welfare Approved)—can be relied upon for meat and poultry that have been humanely raised. But will we actually be willing to pledge conformity with each and every rule? I don’t know, and Peter says, "Probably not. . —Mark Scherzer
