MEDIA RELEASE 25 May 2009
Dim-witted and vacuous comments made by the man in charge of reviewing the pig welfare code have outraged pig welfare campaigners.
National animal advocacy group SAFE says comments made on the Sunday programme last night by Dr Peter O’Hara were unscientific, anthropomorphic and ridiculously out of sync with the views of the New Zealand public.
SAFE says Dr Peter O’Hara, the chairman of the Minister of Agriculture’s National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (NAWAC), is a dinosaur using archaic unscientific logic, and calls on the Minister to fire him.
“How can the Minister of Agriculture and the New Zealand public have any confidence in NAWAC drafting a balanced code of welfare when the man in charge of the code review process is such a dim-witted dinosaur, who believes pig crates are not cruel?,” says SAFE campaign director Hans Kriek.
Asked by the Sunday programme if pigs are happy in sow stalls, Dr Peter O’Hara stated “There’s no reason to think they’re not.”
“When the pig welfare code was drafted in 2001, NAWAC ruled that sow stalls were in breach of the Animal Welfare Act 1999 and recommended sow stalls be phased out. Now we have the NAWAC chair convinced pig crates are not inhumane. There is considerable scientific evidence that confinement of sows in stalls reduces their welfare and Dr O’Hara knows this,” says Mr Kriek.
Extract from SAFE’s submission on the Draft Pig Welfare Code 2001:
The EU Scientific Veterinary Committee (1997) concluded that sows housed in stalls exhibit high levels of stereotypies, unresolved aggression, inactivity, unresponsiveness, weak bones and muscles and clinical conditions. They observed that group-housed sows “…show less abnormality of bone and muscle development, much less abnormal behaviour, less likelihood of extreme physiological responses, less of the urinary tract infections associated with inactivity, and better cardiovascular fitness.” (p. 100). The Committee recommended that “Since sow welfare appears to be better when sows are not confined throughout gestation, sows should preferably be kept in groups.”
For more information contact Hans Kriek 027 446 2711.
SAFE’s 2001 submission to NAWAC in 2001 is available at: http://www.lovepigs.org.nz/Latest-news/Mike-King-story/Media/