Slaughter rules need updates says OLA president

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

The president of the Ontario Landowners Association says government needs to consider adjusting slaughter rules so people can take responsibility for their own food.

“A lot of people don’t want to buy it from a processing plant because they have no idea what the animal looked like before it was killed,” says Tom Black. “They want to buy it and see it alive and that’s what drives people out to the country to do this, especially immigrants. They want to do the pre-kill inspection.”

Black made the comments following the recent fine levied against a Stouffville-area farmer for slaughtering animals without the before and after inspection required by law.

On March 14 in an Ontario Court of Justice in Newmarket, Akram Wasim pleaded guilty to four charges and was fined $12,225 plus the 25 per cent victim fine surcharge. The charges were: one count of slaughtering food animals (goats and sheep) without a license; one count of failing to present live food animals to an inspector for inspection and approval for slaughter; one count of failing to present the carcass of food animals intended for human consumption to an inspector after slaughter and one additional count of slaughtering animals without a license on April 20, 2013 while the first offenses were still before the courts.

Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources officers visited Wasim’s farm on Oct. 26, 2012 and found him slaughtering animals in front of customers. After investigating, officers found Wasim didn’t have a license to operate a slaughter facility and there wasn’t any before and after slaughter inspection, according to an April 8 agriculture ministry press release.

Wasim couldn’t be reached for comment.

Black says while his organization doesn’t advocate breaking the law, his personal opinion is “what better inspector is there than the person who is going to eat it. He’s going to inspect that animal before and after (slaughter) a way better than any hired inspector because he’s going to be eating it and he has more time to do it.”

Black questions how much time government inspectors spend actually looking at livestock before they’re slaughtered. He says he took a truckload of his 300 chickens to a provincially licensed plant to get them killed and the inspector came to the back of the truck looked in and cleared them for slaughter. “Is that inspecting each individual chicken? There’s no way they do that.”

According to the ministry’s news release, in Ontario, the Food Safety and Quality Act and its meat regulations make it mandatory for slaughter facilities to be licensed and have an inspector present before and after slaughter to minimize food safety risks to consumers. Rodger Dunlop, manager of the regulatory compliance unit for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, says farmers can only slaughter their own animals on their farms for their own consumption. Any animals being sold for consumption must be slaughtered in a federally or provincially licensed facility “and in that case they would be subject to the inspection.”

Before slaughter, an inspector must look at all animals “and just verify and approve them for slaughter,” Dunlop says. “That essentially rules out any potential diseases or conditions that might be harmful to other animals or to people for human consumption.”

Inspectors “do a thorough post-mortem inspection to make sure the animal is free of any pathological conditions or disease that might render it unfit for human consumption,” he says.

Dunlop says the fine Wasim received wasn’t the maximum amount that’s listed in the Ontario Food Safety and Quality Act. That maximum amount is $25,000 per count. “It’s not approaching the maximum, but it is a significant penalty,” he says. BF