Prepare the plant for a customer animal welfare audit

What is going on

Hoshino Trading Company will audit animal welfare in lairage and at the knocking box on 6 October. The General Manager wants an internal audit done first so the plant knows what it would fail on. Recent data shows an effective first stun rate of 99.6 per cent, a slip and fall rate of 0.4 per cent and two near misses in lairage this month, including a steer breaking through a forcing pen gate while a stockperson was inside. A goat arrived lame on Wednesday and was assessed by the animal welfare officer. The Emergency Animal Disease Response Plan was updated in August and has not yet been exercised. The audit will also test whether workers can recognise the signs of a notifiable disease.

Your brief

Conduct an internal animal welfare audit of lairage and stunning against the Animal Welfare Policy and the national standards, analyse the monitoring and incident data, test readiness under the Emergency Animal Disease Response Plan, and give the General Manager a findings summary and action plan.

Work through it

You do not need to do it all. Doing a few of these will show you what the work is like. Your ticks and notes stay on this device.

• Read the Animal Welfare Policy and the Australian Animal Welfare Standards and Guidelines for Livestock at Processing Establishments summary supplied, and build an audit checklist covering unloading, penning, water, handling aids, stunning and emergency kill.
• Extract the stun, slip and fall and prodder use data from the QA Monitoring and Verification Log and the lairage records supplied, and comment on trends against the plant targets.
• Review the two lairage near misses in the Incident and Hazard Register and assess whether the corrective actions address the causes, updating the records with your findings.
• Using the observation notes supplied by your assessor from a simulated walk through, record each checklist item as conforming or non-conforming with objective evidence.
• Assess the fitness decision made for the lame goat in consignment LR-26-1046 against the procedure and the policy and record whether it was correct.
• Design a short tabletop exercise of the Emergency Animal Disease Response Plan for the lairage crew and list the signs of foot and mouth disease and lumpy skin disease they must be able to recognise.
• Prepare the findings summary and action plan for the General Manager, ranking each non-conformance by risk and giving an owner and a date before 6 October.

What someone in this role would produce

• Animal welfare audit checklist with recorded findings
• Data analysis of stun, slip and fall and prodder use
• Updated incident register entries
• Emergency Animal Disease tabletop exercise outline
• Findings summary and action plan for the General Manager