Investigating transportation parameters of broiler chickens in a transport simulator

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The transportation of meat animals (beef, swine and poultry) is a challenge. Consumers continue to become increasingly aware of how the food they purchase and consume is produced, and they expect food animals to be treated in a humane manner. As such, consumer opinions are influencing how animal agriculture operations and production occur. Although the poultry industry has participated in the development of codes of practice to guide transportation of birds, the majority of these codes were developed using collective wisdom and professional opinions. There is a lack of scientific data available to support and guide the development and maintenance of these codes, leaving the current codes and regulations subject to criticism and debate. These codes of practice will soon be under review, and they will be revised by groups of policy developers, regulatory agencies, processors and producers. This review process and the committees will expect assistance, in the form of research and scientific data, to support the code revisions. Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan are leaders in work related to poultry transportation, with a focus on characterizing the environmental conditions and bird responses within transport vehicles during a wide range of typical Canadian prairie weather conditions. Field-based research allows the test conditions to be most accurately replicated, but it is also time consuming, expensive and subject to variations in uncontrollable factors such as ambient temperature and humidity. Further, the environmental conditions present on the Canadian prairies do not encompass the range of conditions that will be present across the country. Ongoing work will be required to support the code revisions, and a lab-based poultry transport simulator is proposed to more efficiently generate data under a wider range of environmental conditions, to allow greater control of exposure conditions and to support more intense monitoring. The first objective of the proposed research (phase 1) would be to identify the typical and ranges of temperature and humidity gradients, air velocities and vibrations experienced at the scale of an individual drawer of broiler chickens within a commercial transport trailer. Next (phase 2), a poultry transport simulator, able to accommodate a single drawer of poultry and re-create the conditions measured in phase 1, will be designed, constructed and evaluated, based on its ability to simulate field-based conditions. Lastly (phase 3), the transport simulator will be used in an initial set of tests to monitor the responses of broiler chickens in terms of live shrink, core body temperature, heart rate, blood parameters, behaviour and meat quality measures, while birds are exposed to a range of environmental conditions. The results of this research (phase 3) will start to define exposure limits for safe and humane transportation of market-age broiler chickens.