The use of body cameras proves valuable in conducting animal welfare assessments amid the current restrictions designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 
Researchers with Western College of Veterinary Medicine evaluated the use of body cameras, similar to those used by police departments, as an option for barn personnel to support remote animal welfare assessments. 
Dr. Giuliana Miguel Pacheco at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine said producers could use animal welfare assessments to monitor their pigs’ wellbeing and assurance programs such as the Canadian Quality Assurance program. 
“Because of animal welfare science, we know that animals require minimum living conditions to have a life worth living.” 
There they carry out welfare assessments to assess that animal care standards are providing animals with good welfare. Running welfare assessments and using the information to improve living conditions could improve consumer trust in farms especially with the public. 
Body cameras become part of the picture because they facilitate the monitoring of animals at any point in time or monitoring various farms at the same time. They could help producers to manage their animals more effectively. Also, enabling production managers to streamline several barns’ assessments can support animal care and management within their animals’ companies. 
On top of these benefits for animals and producers, it can reduce travel costs for those in charge of assessments and biosecurity risks for the farms involved. 
Dr. Pacheco said when researchers looked into how to reach many farms to collect data, COVID-19 was not part of the picture, so this approach helps to work around the current COVID restrictions. 
Dr. Yolande Seddon said they will always need live assessments but also having the virtual ability allows increased oversight. 
In terms of automating this, if the research shows value in assessing animal welfare on carcasses at slaughter, they’d need to automate that process because of the volume of animals processed in an abattoir coming from across the country. 
“That would mean that we could automate the feedback and the understanding of the knowledge that is coming off these animals to have a continuous feedback loop.” 
She said there is a lot of research going into artificial intelligence and how imaging systems can pick up animals’ behaviours. Also, marks on animals or indicators and, therefore further down the line, automate data capture on farms to help manage the animals and build up data on animal care. 
Dr. Seddon said the video would not replace live assessments, but it adds another layer of oversight. •
— By Harry Siemens