Poultry transportation and its effects on bird productivity, welfare and health

肉类动物（牛肉、猪和家禽）的运输是一个挑战。消费者越来越意识到他们购买和消费的食品是如何生产的，并期望食用动物得到人道的对待。因此，消费者的意见正在影响畜牧业经营和生产的方式。虽然家禽业参与了指导禽鸟运输的工作守则的制定，但这些守则大多是利用集体智慧和专业意见制定的。缺乏科学数据来支持和指导这些规范的制定和维护，使现行的规范和条例受到批评和辩论。这些行为守则将很快受到审查，并将由政策制订者、管理机构、加工商和生产者组成的小组进行修订。该审查过程和委员会将期望获得科学数据形式的援助，以支持代码修订。******萨斯喀彻温大学的研究人员是家禽运输相关工作的领导者，重点研究在广泛的典型加拿大草原天气条件下，运输车辆内的环境条件和鸟类反应。基于现场的研究可以最准确地复制测试条件，但它也耗时、昂贵，并且受环境温度和湿度等不可控因素的影响。此外，加拿大大草原上的环境条件并不包括全国范围内的环境条件。将需要继续开展工作以支持代码修订，并建议使用实验室家禽运输模拟器，以便在更广泛的环境条件下更有效地生成数据，以便更好地控制暴露条件并支持更密切的监测。******拟议研究的第一阶段将以单个肉鸡抽屉的规模描述商业家禽运输拖车内的振动水平。振动数据将与已经收集的温度、湿度和空气速度数据结合使用。接下来（第二阶段），一个能够重新创建第一阶段测量条件的传输模拟器将用于生成商业环境中所经历的条件范围。这一阶段将研究温度、湿度、持续时间和鸟的大小对肉鸡反应的影响。这些反应将通过监测鸟类的参数，如活体收缩、血液参数、核心体温、行为和肉质测量来量化。这项研究的结果将开始确定安全、人道地运输市售龄肉鸡的暴露限度。

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 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 the 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 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 don't encompass the range of conditions that will be present across the country. Ongoing work will be required to support the code revisions, and the use of 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 phase of the proposed research would be to characterize vibration levels within a commercial poultry transport trailer at the scale of an individual drawer of broiler chickens. Vibration data will be used in combination with temperature, humidity and air velocity data already collected. Next (phase 2), a transport simulator able to re-create the conditions measured in phase 1 will be used to generate the range of conditions experienced in a commercial setting. This phase will investigate the effects of temperature, humidity, duration, and bird size on the responses of broiler chickens. These responses will be quantified by monitoring bird parameters such as live shrink, blood parameters, core body temperature, behaviour and meat quality measures. The results of this research will start to define exposure limits for safe and humane transportation of market-age broiler chickens.