Washington Farm Animal Welfare Symposium

 Representatives of Washington’s livestock industry along with the state’s veterinarian community will come together September 15 at WSU in Pullman for the Washington Farm Animal Welfare Symposium, hosted by WSU’s Center for the Study of Animal Well-being. Jesse Robbins, Program Director for the Washington State Dairy Federation, talks about the broad goal of the event.

ROBBINS: So this event basically has a line up of a lot of well respected speakers that have spent a lot of time thinking about animal welfare issues and being involved in discussions both in the U.S. and in Canada. The audience will represent academia, industry producers, agriculture representatives, and a number of other folks - Allied Industries, veterinarians, and hopefully it will spark some conversations, some thoughts, some ideas, and some discussions.

Robbins says the state’s livestock industry has already been working to improve consumer perceptions about farm animal welfare.

ROBBINS: We’ve been much more active here in Washington about trying to increase the overall education or general public understanding of what happens everyday on a farm, and telling them about all the great things that they may not know about that we do with our animals in mind.

Symposium highlights will include industry panel discussions on risk management, animal behavior, and the ethical and political implications of animal welfare decisions.

We’ll visit more tomorrow with Robbins on what the dairy farmers of Washington are doing towards the improvement of animal welfare.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.