Over eight years Halter has developed and refined our technology and gained deep expertise in training and guiding animals while protecting their welfare. We take very seriously the high standards around responsible animal learning and training experiences.
Below are Halter’s animal welfare standards to ensure animal welfare is protected when training, containing and guiding animals with virtual fencing technology. These standards are organised into the following sections:
- Safety standards: On-farm and animal safety provisions.
- Animal welfare protections: Principle-based guidelines to protect animal welfare.
- Technical specifications: Accuracy and reliability standards.
- Training protocols: Ensuring training is delivered effectively.
- Operational protocols: Protecting against deliberate misuse or system failures.
- Compliance and enforcement: Certification, complaints handling and severe incidents.
- Consumer protection: Farmer training and ongoing customer support.
- Research and development: Facilitating continuous improvement of systems.
1. Safety Standards
- System use: The farmer must operate virtual fencing in accordance with Halter’s instructions for the use of the collars and the system. This requires Halter ensuring that our user instructions do not knowingly compromise animal welfare.
- Misuse: Halter must monitor our systems and alert farmers if we detect that the system is being used incorrectly.
- Animal safety of collar design: Physical safety standards must ensure that the collar fits ergonomically and is not a choking hazard under normal operating conditions. The collar should not cause widespread skin lesions or persistent irritation. The collar design must accommodate an animal’s growth and include break-away points or similar safety features to mitigate entanglement risk.
- Multiple neck devices: Animals must not be made to wear more than one collar or harness around the neck.
- Electrical safety: Halter must ensure that devices cannot deliver unexpected or unplanned aversive stimulus. Devices to have all-weather protection.
- Physical boundary fences: As per existing overarching animal welfare laws, users of virtual fencing must maintain a physical boundary fence as a failsafe mechanism for containing animals.
- Environmental safety: Ensuring the collars and its materials do not endanger the animal across the most extreme range of weather conditions encountered, for example, extreme heat, cold, and wet.
2. Animal Welfare Protections
- Animal welfare: We follow principle-based guidelines on how systems should protect animal welfare outcomes.
- Aversive stimuli must pause or have a stand-down period if there is evidence that an animal is failing to understand the cues.
- Aversive stimuli must not cause an animal unnecessary distress, any injury, acute or chronic physical or psychological health impacts.
- We monitor for any animal consistently failing to understand the cues and alert the farmer so that they can take alternative actions.
- The collar and the animal must be individually paired, so that an animal does not receive an aversive stimulus because of the action of another animal.
- Aversive stimuli must not be delivered to animals showing signs of panic such as running from predators, loud noises etc.
- Humans must never have direct control over administering aversive stimuli to the animals. Other factors determining the system administering cues could include the animal’s behaviour, the animal’s current location and the desired location for the animal as set by the farmer.
- Demonstrated effectiveness: We must be able to demonstrate to government officials that our system manages animals while adhering to animal welfare principles.
- Supporting natural behaviours: The system should align with sound animal learning principles, support the animal’s expected natural behaviour on a farm and support animal agency by as far as possible working with the animal, not against it. For example, for cows being virtually herded, giving them sufficient time when passing water troughs and reducing pressure at gateways.
- Individual optimisation: The system should be optimised for individual animals by utilizing the minimum number and minimum strength of aversive stimuli to successfully virtually contain and herd each animal.
- Cue disablement: Cue disablement should be customised per individual animal based on previous behaviour. The system should not apply any cues if an animal fails to respond to repeated cues. The system should only apply cues again once the animal has demonstrated it can respond safely.
- Use cases: Guidelines should be provided to farmers about the appropriate versus inappropriate uses of virtual fencing. For example:
- Environments where virtual fencing should not be used.
- Minimum age limits for collaring animals, as tested and validated by Halter.
- Changes in management routines that should not be implemented without careful supervision.
3. Technical Specifications
- GPS safety: Any location tracking systems used in virtual fencing must ensure they contain and herd animals safely and accurately, including the ability to filter out significant GPS location errors.
- Reliability: There should be guidelines to ensure that the system operates reliably and has redundancy or backup procedures to protect animal welfare in scenarios such as when the system is temporarily offline due to a power or communications outage.
- Security: Halter should take industry-standard steps to ensure security of its information technology systems.
4. Training Protocols
- Predictable and controllable: Training must ensure that the animal comes to understand and react appropriately without becoming distressed. Following a successful training period, virtual fencing cues must be perceived as predictable and controllable for the animal. The system must ensure that cues are delivered consistently to each individual animal.
- Training assessment: If an animal does not show any progress towards understanding the cues, this must be flagged to the farmer for resolution. If necessary, training of that animal should be aborted.
- Training for users: Suppliers should have clear user policies and user training to ensure users can operate the virtual fencing system safely and effectively.
- Training environment: Before animal training commences and cues are activated, animals should be settled in their surroundings and in a routine that the farmer will continue.
5. Operational Protocols
- Diagnostics and maintenance: Halter must monitor for and alert the user to any device failures that may pose a serious animal welfare risk, and take urgent steps to assess and resolve these.
- Emergency protocols: The system should have protocols in place for circumstances where the system fails or is otherwise inoperable, including manual override options, to ensure that animals are not contained in an area for an unreasonable length of time. For example, the farmer could have the ability to deactivate the system and shift the animals manually if required.
- Resistance to tampering: The design of the hardware device (collar) and communications system should be very difficult to tamper with.
6. Compliance and Enforcement
- Monitoring: Suppliers should continuously monitor their system to ensure it is operating as expected.
- Complaint handling: There should be guidelines for Halter to receive, document and manage customer complaints relating to animal welfare.
- Severe incident logging: Halter should record any incidents where virtual fencing system failures cause significant pain or distress to animals and the corrective actions taken by the supplier. If appropriate, Halter can share this information with the relevant regulatory authority.
7. Consumer Protection
- Fault alerts: Halter must alert farmers if the system detects faults that may risk harm to animals.
- Disaster recovery: Halter must have procedures in place to ensure the continuation of service or backup procedures in the event of a major system failure.
- User support: There should be support available and communication to users regarding major system upgrades or changes to the user experience.
- Training support: There should be ongoing training materials and support available to farmers to upskill, incorporate new features, and onboard new farm staff.
- Support: Halter should provide farmers/users with support, including documentation and help-desk-style troubleshooting to help resolve technical issues if they arise.
8. Research and Development
- Software rollback: Halter must be able to promptly roll back or rectify software updates if an update inadvertently harms animal welfare.
