Whether it is on the phone in my office in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, a convention for one of our state affiliates or one of our small plants across the country, if the conversation is about humane handling, we are talking about stunning and the enforcement by USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) on mis-stuns. If you are one of our numerous members who still do slaughter operations at your facility, you know that enforcement has become way too heavy-handed and inconsistent at best. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand some of the steps taken by inspection personnel in response to a plant having a mis-stun. Depending on your inspector and what part of the country or state that you are in, you could receive anything from a noncompliance report (NR) all the way up to a suspension of your slaughter floor.
This is an area we will continue to work diligently on in Washington to get clarity and common sense in the enforcement of the humane handling regulations, but that is not what this article is about. I want to discuss what our responsibility is as an industry and as individual businesses to this issue and the steps we need to take that gives us a better chance of being incident free on our kill floors.