Trucking is high stress for pigs, and Dr
Luigi Faucitano, a meat scientist with the Sherbrooke Research Centre of
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, said stress levels could be lessened by
reducing the slope of the ramps.
“We compared the pot-belly trailer and the
compact truck, which is a truck and a trailer with hydraulic features, on two
decks with a top deck being operated hydraulically and we noted more death
losses in the pot-belly trailer compared to the other one,” he said during the
recent Banff Pork Seminar.
“We observed . . . that more losses were in the top
deck (than) in the bottom deck because of the ramp.
“The pigs were more fatigued at loading so they
couldn't recover from the stress of loading from negotiating the ramp and they
eventually died during travel.
“The ramp inside the trailer within loading systems
is something that should be avoided or corrected,” he said.
“Replacing ramps with hydraulic devices, with
hydraulic decks is a solution.
“Otherwise, for truckers who do not want to replace
the trailer with a new one, they just have to modify their pot-belly trailer
with ramps, modifying the ramps in terms of slope, decreasing the slope,
building less steep ramps.”
