ABSTRACT
To have good animal welfare during handling for vaccinations, truck loading, milking, moving between pastures or movement through a slaughter plant requires management who is committed to maintaining high standards. A numerical scoring system developed by the author made it possible to put hard numbers on animal-handling practices. When baseline scores were first collected at slaughter plants, the usage of electric prods was high. In some places, each animal was poked more than once with an electric prod. Recent surveys of large feedlots in Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska indicate that the average electric prod use is on 5% or less of the cattle. For a stockperson to have a positive attitude, it is essential that they are not worked to exhaustion where they get too tired to care about doing things right. There is a need to increase the professional status of the people who handle cattle, doing jobs such as vaccinating the animals.
