Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Every domesticated and farmed animal slaughtered commercially for human consumption must
pre-harvest undergo an official ante-mortem inspection conducted by an official veterinarian.
However, small-scale abattoirs and game handling establishments can be located far away from
the Swedish Food Agency’s official control office. The aim of this study is to explore the feasibility of remote ante-mortem inspection as a part of the official control at Swedish small-capacity
abattoirs, as well as evaluating the impact of various conditions on the user experience of those
conducting the remote ante-mortem inspection.
Non-compliances were registered during two weeks at two different abattoirs with one week
spent at each establishment. One of the abattoirs was a large-capacity abattoir processing pigs,
while the other was a small-capacity abattoir processing cattle and sheep. Inter-rater variability
between two raters, one technical support person who was holding the camera whilst conducting
an on-site ante-mortem inspection and one remote official veterinarian conducting a remote antemortem inspection over a live video feed. Additionally, in each session, the raters scored their user
experience in a set of five categories. A total of 4032 pigs, as well as 39 cattle and 10 sheep, were
inspected over the course of 22 sessions.
The overall agreement between raters and kappa-value based agreements were almost perfect
(overall agreement 99.4% and 98.0%, Cohen’s kappa 0.920 and 0.911, PABAK 0.989 and 0.959,
at the large-capacity and small-capacity abattoirs respectively) and McNemar’s chi-squared test
with continuity correction could not reject the null hypothesis. The average user experience scores
of all categories were all rated as satisfactory or better. Consequently, remote ante-mortem inspection poses a feasible flexibility option as part of the official meat inspection in Sweden and
Europe.