Temple Grandin visits SCFF Ltd

Date: Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Southern Counties Fresh Foods hosted a visit to the Somerset abattoir to
one of the world’s leading animals welfare experts. Temple Grandin from
Colorado USA flew in to the UK to attend the EBLEX annual conference and
spent a day discussing the benefits of good cattle handling systems with
Alice Pattinson (Tesco) and the SCFF livestock team. The SCFF handling
system that was the first of it’s kind to be installed in the UK more
than 12 years ago was based on Temple’s idea that cattle are much
happier to walk around curved areas rather than angular and sharp
movement systems.



On seeing the system at SCFF Temple said “I was delighted to see that my
ideas are being implemented in UK abattoirs. SCFF are clearly seeing the
benefits in handling the cattle in the right way. It is really important
that we create a safe environment for cattle at all stages in their
lifetime and people underestimate how valuable this is during the
transportation and lairaging of the animals pre slaughter. Southern
Counties has taken on board all of my observations and operate an
excellent lairage facility”.



More and more farmers are operating quality handling systems on their
farms and SCFF have a great deal of information on how to improve
handling pre slaughter. Please contact SCFF for more information.