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

肉类动物(牛肉、猪和家禽)的运输是一项挑战。消费者继续越来越多地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的运作和生产。虽然家禽业参与了指导禽鸟运输的业务守则的制定，但这些守则中的大部分都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守则的制定和维护，使现行的守则和条例受到批评和辩论。这些业务守则将很快接受审查，政策制定者、监管机构、加工商和生产者团体将对其进行修订。这一审查进程和各委员会将期待以科学数据的形式得到援助，以支持准则修订。*萨斯喀彻温省大学的研究人员是家禽运输相关工作的领导者，专注于描述运输车辆内的环境条件和在加拿大典型草原天气条件下的鸟类反应。基于现场的研究可以最准确地复制测试条件，但它也很耗时、昂贵，而且受环境温度和湿度等不可控因素的影响。此外，加拿大大草原上目前的环境条件并不包括全国各地将出现的条件范围。将需要正在进行的工作来支持准则修订，并建议使用基于实验室的家禽运输模拟器，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，并支持更严格的监测。*拟议研究的第一阶段将是描述商业家禽运输拖车内单个抽屉肉鸡规模的振动水平。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。下一步(阶段2)，将使用能够重新创建在阶段1中测量的条件的运输模拟器来生成在商业环境中经历的条件范围。这一阶段将研究温度、湿度、持续时间和禽类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、行为和肉类质量指标来量化。这项研究的结果将开始确定市场年龄肉鸡安全和人道运输的暴露限值。

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.