Meat+Poultry - December 2016 - 46

I N - P L A N T O P E R AT I O N S

- DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN

46

Arrowsight the leader in RVA. These qualities
also transfer to endeavors into the medical
industry where the company provides RVA
services to hospitals.

DR. TEMPLE GRANDIN
To help set up Arrowsight's animal welfare and
handling RVA business in the most efficient
and productive way possible, Temple Grandin,
Ph.D., who is a professor of animal science at
Colorado State Univ., began guiding Arrowsight
Inc. in 2004 on the use of RVA in conjunction
with the then called AMI guidelines for animal
handling. Grandin's knowledge, experience
and reputation in the animal handling industry
are unmatched. Throughout her career, Dr.
Grandin's work in the industry has brought
about substantial positive change.
In 2008, there was a watershed moment and
significant product recall directly connected
to animal welfare that had long reaching
ramifications within the industry. "Dr. Grandin
recommended to the USDA and the largest
industry companies that they explore RVA
services to optimize animal welfare issues,"
Aronson says. As a result, Aronson was
called to testify at a congressional hearing.
The hearing and Aronson's testimony started
the discussions that led to Cargill becoming
Arrowsight's first "large-scale" customer for
animal welfare RVA. In the past eight years,
Arrowsight's services have grown from just a
few clients to over 100 plants and include all
major proteins.
"I was a big supporter of it right from the
beginning," Grandin says. She explains her role

MEAT+ POULTRY | 12.16 | www.meatpoultry.com

RESULTS
Cargill's 29 North American harvest facilities
all use Arrowsight's services. "They send us
weekly reports, they make us aware of any
occurrences they may see during their audit
that would be out of scope with our training
procedures and they provide us trend analysis
to compare specific criteria areas by shifts,
by day and by plants," says Mike Siemens,
global leader of animal welfare and husbandry
at Cargill. "They can basically provide any
analysis of any matrix that we want."
While Cargill's animal welfare and audit
programs always performed well, there is
always room for improvement, Siemens says.
He adds that Arrowsight gave facilities insight
into further improvement and allowed the
company to raise the bar of expectation and
maintain higher levels of improvement.
JBS USA installed cameras and began using

William A. Cotton / Colorado State Univ.

"I was a big
supporter of it
right from the
beginning."

with Arrowsight in the beginning included help
with camera positioning to give auditors the
right perspective as well as the criteria to base
audits on. "The biggest thing I helped them
with was just how to set up the auditing. Take
the AMI guidelines, which are now the NAMI
guidelines - the five objective criteria - and
audit those on video," she says. Dr. Grandin
remains an Arrowsight consultant today.
Many plants over the years have installed
video cameras monitored in house by someone
at the plant, but Dr. Grandin is adamant about
the necessity of third-party auditing.
"The one point I am going to make is some
outside entity has to audit that," she says.
"Arrowsight happens to be the main one, but to
make cameras effective, somebody outside the
plant, a third party has to audit those cameras."
While she believes strongly in RVA, Dr.
Grandin doesn't subscribe to it as an end all,
be all solution to animal welfare and humane
handling auditing. She says that the nature of
a video camera dictates a limited window of
sight into what goes on throughout the yard.
They do serve well to audit what Dr. Grandin
calls "hot spots," such as unloading ramps,
stunning stations, and the ramps leading up to
restrainers, but activity happens throughout
the entire plant. "They can't look at the whole
yard. They can't look at everything," Dr.
Grandin says. "So you still need to have people
on the ground going in and looking at plants."
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