White Fox, Saskatchewan based DNL Farms launched its new Low Stress Pig Handling blog earlier this year.

The web site, located at lowstresspighandling.com, targets swine handlers, truckers and those involved in supervising or training swine handlers.

DNL low stress pig handling trainer Nancy Lidster says animal welfare audits are now a fact of life at the packing plants and that process is moving back into transportation and onto farms.

Nancy Lidster-DNL Farms

I think it's really important that handlers start understanding and learning and developing the skills that they're going to need to meet those animal welfare audits and the skills and stuff that will help them pass audits and meet those audit standards will also just make their life a whole lot easier on a day to day basis as well.

It's all related to the relationship between handlers and pigs.

I think in a lot of cases when people are having problems moving pigs they don't know what to look for.

They're not picking up the physical cues that the pigs are giving them so they can anticipate what the pigs are going to do next.

What we're trying to do is help people to understand pig behavior, help them understand how to read the pigs and anticipate what they're going to do and use the pigs' natural behavior to get the responses that they're wanting from them.

In a lot of cases it's just a matter of, once they see what they need to be looking for and what they need to do with that they're looking at, then that just is like turning on a light bulb and it makes things a whole lot easier for them.

The blog is updated weekly.

Mr Lidster says subscribers receive email notifications when new articles have been posted to the blog and they have the ability to post comments and to make suggestions on topics they would like to see covered.