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

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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.