A recent incident of mistreatment of cattle at a slaughterhouse illustrates, I think, an opportunity to use a strategy of webcams, information transparency, and public participation (i.e. crowdsourcing) to improve slaughterhouse practices.

On January 30th the Humane Society released undercover video content of "downer" dairy cows - too sick or injured to be able to walk - being mistreated to get them onto their feet and into the Hallmark Meat Packing Co (Chino, CA) slaughterhouse. "Downer" cattle are at increased risk for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease") and other foodborne pathogens, and so the USDA regulations prevent the slaughter for human consumption of crippled cows.

The Humane Society video shows sickening treatment (cattle prods, forklifts, water hoses) of obviously injured or unhealthy animals. The video led to the "voluntary" recall of 143 million pounds of raw and frozen beef products by Hallmark. More on the outcome of the investigation on the HSUS blog.

USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) does have inspectors and veterinarians who work on site at slaughterhouses to inspect and enforce the regulations, but in this case the video was captured by an undercover Humane Society investigator .

I think some low-cost internet technology could really change the regulatory regime for slaughterhouses. I suggest that live webcams be used to show a video feed on the web of the walkway which cattle use to enter the slaughterhouse. I think this could work with slaughterhouses because:
-there are finite number of known facilities, and USDA already has inspectors at these facilities permanently (or often) and so ensuring that the webcams are in place and working would be simple.
-visual inspection is valuable in identifying if cattle are sufficiently healthy. This is a key tool that on-the-ground inspectors reply upon.
-"noncompliance" is a major risk - to public health, and to public trust in the safety of the US food supply.

The webcams could provide a live feed to the internet, where the public could observe what is the visual condition of cattle being led into the slaughterhouse. This concept of using webcams was suggested on the food safety BarfBlog (International Foor Safety Network, Kansas State University), which noted that bars are increasingly using webcams to allow potential patrons to check out the scene before heading to a bar(!)

What BarfBlog did not talk about was the power of such a crowdsourcing approach to make possible the participation of a large distributed group of interested people. Slaughterhouse webcams would not replace FSIS on the ground inspection, but could would enable interested citizens to watch for potential problems and "tag" the video to raise issues to USDA. USDA might argue that they'd face a lot of problems with untrained viewers and false positives... but that can be addressed - just set up an online training program and give special "reporting" privileges to people who have gone through that "webcam inspector" training. This would not replace USDA's on the ground inspectors, but supplement their work, and probably change slaughterhouse performance by raising expectations.

A secondary benefit of the process of engaging the public to watch and track these webcams would be to raise public awareness of the food chain - where does our food come from and how, for better or worse(!)

Crowdsourcing inspection of food safety like this is in line with prior work on regulation/business behavior in World Bank research on information disclosure as a regulatory strategy, and work by the Center for Global Development (Forum One client) in using information transparency as a tool to address carbon emission via the Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) web site (and blog).