Good animal care must become a habit and part of the culture, writes Dave Sjeklocha, DVM. Training workers and family members on animal handling and care has never been more important. Documenting this training equally important. And we must continue to train, retrain and redocument, he says.
Dr. Sjeklocha recently reviewed recent activities by animal rights groups. He reminds us to distinguish between animal rights (AR) and animal welfare (AW):
- The ultimate agenda of AR would end the use of animals for food, clothing, entertainment or experimentation.
- Many AR groups are constantly trying to blur the distinction between AR and AW, with some AR groups abandoning the AR label and claiming to be AW.
Source: BEEF, August 6, 2019. Link.
“Good enough” should never be good enough — we must always strive to do a little better today than we did yesterday.” – Dave Sjeklocha, DVM, Technical Services, Merck Animal Health.
INSIGHTS: Beef Quality Assurance programs < link > have evolved to include best practices around good record keeping and protecting herd health in recent years. There are two ways to become BQA certified:
- Attend an in-person training: Trainings typically take 2 to 4 hours and are led by authorized BQA trainers.
- Take the online course: Available on demand. Start and stop as you please. Estimated time is 2 hours.
Hot summer days are a great time to gather a group of producers for animal handling training before the weaning and branding time arrives.