Literary Review- The Big Industry of Meat.

In order to learn how to reduce stress and to provide a better environment

for the animal until it is taken into the meat industry, it is necessary to learn the

principal of livestock behavior and how they can be used to facilitate handling

during feeding process, truck loading, veterinary procedures, until their final

destination. To create a model that works on sustaining animal welfare and still

achieves the basics of economical procedures that competes with other markets it

is necessary to start from the bottom, which includes livestock senses, facility

layout and design, restraint, stress and handling, humane slaughter, and other

various procedures.

Handling

Handling is one of the most important aspects and the first place where

reducing stress and assuring animal welfare most be vital. Knowing animals’

physiological characteristics and behavior will guarantee a better handling during

the whole process of breeding. For example, a study had shown that using solid

slides on loading ramps, chutes, and crowd pens can reduce anxiety and make the

handling easier for animals such like cattle, pigs, and sheep which have a wide-

angle panoramic vision (Grandin, 1993).

Any livestock require of specific use of equipment and facility designs,

mostly to prepare the ground where the animals will be staying for their whole life.

To adequate the facility, it is necessary to plan the livestock flow in order to have
sufficient pen space to gather all the animals, and also separated spaces for

sorting them. Farmers design diagrams of their farms that specify the points where

handling, weighing, and sorting procedures will take place, indicating the route that

livestock will be taking to get into the corral, and comforting the functionality of the

system. Equipment also includes all prime materials needed for the survival of

livestock, the amount and quality of the food and water is vital during all the

process. It is said that dehydrated cattle reduces productivity, the meat after the

harvest is more difficult to held and process, by not mentioning the amount of dead

animals found before the harvest.

Mostly of livestock final destination is oriented to meat consumption, and

therefore the word slaughter would be mentioned during the whole process. It is

crucial to add that slaughtering is one of the few areas in animal agriculture that

has strict regulations to guarantee animal welfare. One of the basics, is to free the

animals form pain before any procedure is made. Equipment used to reduce the

pain at the moment of demise consist of electrical stunning equipment ensuring

instant and painless insensibility.

Animal Welfare

Practices that seek for animal welfare had existed since years ago but it is

not until now that many have recognized that most of the practices that had been

common in livestock handling are painful, causing stress, and diminishing animals’

life. Practices like castration, branding, dehorning, ear notching, teeth clipping,

beak trimming, comb and wattle removal, and tail docking causes the animal to
experience pain in different levels . Teaching about animal welfare should be

considered important in every animal science class. It is necessary to understand

that animals deal with different painful experience in their daily life but to difference

an acceptable pain such as a headache with an unacceptable pain like a limb

amputation most be the key point to redesign handling procedures.

When an animal experience pain, its nervous system is activated,

specifically peripheral neurons, central neurons, and neuroendocrine peptides, all

this related to stress. Some experiments had shown that animals that experience

painful procedures reduces their health, reproduction, and threatens their immune

system. But measure pain can be difficult, a person can use animal behavior, feed

intake, reproduction, and health to identify consequences that lead to different

results compared to those who hadn’t experience pain.

Basic Economic principles

Agri-food industry has a huge improvement potential regarding supply chains

management issues, specifically as there is a struggle between the agri-food

supply chains and the balance of customer demand, as there is needed to create a

stable position between farmers and their production capacity. Retailers and

processing companies are not able to notice farmers about the consumer demand,

leading to farmers not being able to take appropriate and accurate decisions.

Starting from the basics, Farming it is an activity in which we use resources

such as water, feedstuffs, and land in order to produce valuable products such as

meat, eggs, milk and so on. Based in this concept, we can say that farming is an
economic unit that consists on input and output, so if a famer wants to have this

economic unit he or she has to manage to produce output that the final value must

exceed the input. Any output or input represent a specific amount of money, either

if they are costs or incomes. Famers should consider all their costs before applying

any procedure, in this case for livestock management. An evaluation of the amount

of money they are going to be putting on equipment, infrastructure, livestock,

feeding, and other vital resources should not exceed the amount of money that the

output make as a profit. Sustainability and allowing the farmer to compete with the

market are vital for the activity of the farm.

Bibliography

 R.V. Diggins C.E. Bundy. [1984]. Producción de carne Bovina. 2a. ed.
Compañía Editorial Continental. México, D.F.
 J. McGlone, A. Hicks. [1993]. Teaching Standard Agricultural Practices That
Are Known to Be Painful. Journal of Animal science, Volume 71 No. 4.
 Ronald D. Kay. [1989]. Farm Management. Texas A&M University. McGraw
Hill
 J. Bijman [e.t.al]. [2006]. International agri-food chains and networks.
Wageningen Academic. USA.