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NPPC opening the barn door on practices to engage public
Story Date: 5/3/2013
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Source: Rita Jane Gabbett, MEATINGLACE, 5/2/13
The National Pork Producers Council has embarked on a transparency campaign in the face of activist assaults on the way hog producers house and raise their animals, according to Dallas Hockman, NPPC vice president of industry relations.
“We’ve done a good job raising our products, but not at raising our voices about how we produce our products,” Hockman told participants at the Animal Agriculture Alliance conference here. He acknowledged the industry has failed to keep pace with changes in the market place and said animal activists have “out-marketed us.”
He said NPPC’s plan today is to “be the answer to (customers’) problems, instead of talking about ours,” and to engage customers to explain why the hog producers do what they do.
Hockman said the most pressing topics NPPC is setting out to explain are: sow housing, use of antibiotics and beta-agonists, euthanasia, and pain management during such procedures as tail docking and castration.
To that end, the group has put together customized presentations, resource guides, topic backgrounders, messaging research, economic analysis, sustainability analysis and third party experts to address questions and concerns.
Hockman said NPPC has a process in place such that if an animal activist video is released in the future, within 24 to 48 hours, the group will have an answer from industry experts on whether the video showed animal abuse or not. Some activist videos have shown normal animal husbandry practices and described them as abuse.
Group housing
Another issue NPPC is addressing with its customers is helping them understand the difficulties inherent in achieving declarations by many foodservice and retail chains that they will over time shift their pork purchases to suppliers that do not house sows in individual gestation stalls.
Hockman said while about 17 percent of current U.S. hog production is from sows housed in some form of group housing, there is currently no system for separating out the pigs that come from those litters from the rest of the hog (and ultimately pork) supply.
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