The Certified Humane® program began as a counter to the abysmal conditions on North American factory farms. It was designed to empower the North American shoppers to weigh in on how they wanted farm animals to be treated — through their purchasing power.
Adele Douglass Jolley, the founder of Certified Humane®, never imagined how the program would grow on such a global scale.
The reason it did so is largely because a Brazilian animal welfare researcher — studying for her doctorate at Purdue University in 2005 — decided to lend her expertise as an inspector for the burgeoning program.
“I needed to be in touch with the animals in the real world,” said Rosangela Poletto, Ph.D., DVM, who later became a member of the Scientific Committee.
Today, Certified Humane® products are sold in 26+ countries. Rosangela and her growing team of inspectors around the globe audit farms and ranches using the program’s rigorous Farm Animal Standards.
The program has exploded in global growth in part because Rosangela never compromised the program’s high standards. Even as it expanded from Brazil, to Argentina, to Peru, throughout Latin America, now to southeast Asia, including India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia.
“Without Rosangela, it would have never happened,” said Mimi Stein, Executive Director of Certified Humane®. “She enforced the program. She makes sure the program doesn’t lose integrity as we grow.”
Dr. Rosangela is now the organization’s Director of Science and Research. When she’s not globetrotting to promote the welfare of farm animals on behalf of Certified Humane®, she’s raising three boys (ages 15, 11 and 4) and teaching at the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
And she’s just getting started.
“I do what I love, and I love to help people to improve the animals’ lives,” she said. “That’s why I never stopped. It’s my passion for everything.”
From the dairy farm to vet school
Rosangela grew up in a small town called Marau in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s most southern state, which sits along the border with Uruguay.
Her family raised dairy cows, horses, and beef cattle on the family farm. Rosangela would help produce and sell pasteurized milk in liter bags to local stores. She always cared for her own dogs at home.
Rosangela would often wash the cows’ water trough, give them fresh water, and then sit back to watch how the cows meandered back to the trough to drink.
“I was just passionate about providing them proper care and observing how they behaved,” Rosangela said.
As she prepared to go to college, she considered both medical school and veterinary school. But on her way to register for classes at the university, she remembers telling her mom that she couldn’t see herself working enclosed between four walls day in and day out.
“I just need to be around the animals,” she said.
Rosangela enrolled in veterinarian school in 1997. She threw herself into her studies, taking extra English classes, studying Italian at a private school and working in the vet hospital lab.
The neurophysiology of piglets
Despite her obsession with watching how animals behaved, Rosangela never thought of studying animal welfare. At the time, that type of science wasn’t a big focus in Latin America.
Rosangela’s perspective changed during her last semester of vet school as she was seeking a final internship to complete her program. One of her professors helped her connect with the animal science department at Michigan State University — and specifically to Brazilian professor Adroaldo Zanella.
Her internship focused on the neurophysiology of piglets, studying how early weaning and social isolation affected their brains. She explored how this dynamic of their care impacted their cortisol mechanism and their ability to manage stress.
“I never thought of myself becoming keen about brain function and its relation to animal welfare in my life,” Rosangela said. “And I loved it.”
After graduating from vet school in 2003, professor Adroaldo Zanella invited her back to Michigan State for a master’s program. That, in turn, led to an invitation to pursue a doctorate — advised by Dr. Jeremy Marchant and Dr. Heng-wei Cheng — at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Livestock Behavior Research Unit based at Purdue University.
In 2005, she moved from Michigan to West Lafayette, Indiana to continue her research at the USDA’s only research unit focused on animal welfare.
The call to the farms
Rosangela first heard about the (brand new) Certified Humane® program while studying at Michigan State. A postdoc fellow she worked with, the late Kirsty Laughlin, left their program to help Adele launch the nonprofit, Humane Farm Animal Care.
At Purdue, Rosangela began to feel what had kept her pursuing a career in medicine: the walls of her research lab were too confining.
“I really loved doing research, but I felt that I needed to go back to the farms,” she said.
In 2005, she reached out to Certified Humane® to offer her expertise as an inspector. Her training involved shadowing Brenda Coe, Ph.D., on a robotic milking operation in Pennsylvania as well as Jose Peralta, Ph.D., DVM, who now works as a professor at Western University of Health Science in California.
For five years, she audited farms that cared for pigs and dairy cows across the United States as she finished her doctorate research.
In 2010, having completed a Ph.D. in behavioral neurophysiology focused on farm animal welfare and a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine, she moved back to Brazil. However, her association with Certified Humane® was far from over.
Just as she arrived back in Brazil, Rosangela got a call from the Certified Humane® main office in Virginia. Certified Humane® already had a collaboration with an organic certification program in Brazil. Now, a producer in Nebraska wanted their butter to be certified. The milk they used came from a dairy farm in Argentina.
So Rosangela traveled to her neighboring country to audit the dairy farm. Then she audited a few laying hen farms in Brazil, then in Argentina. Later, she audited farms in Peru and Uruguay.
Up to that point, Rosangela was the only Certified Humane® inspector in Latin America. But even that was about to change.
Promoting animal welfare to the world
In 2011, Adele asked Rosangela to join the Scientific Committee. Adele had traveled to attend a conference in Brazil and met Rosangela in person for the first time.
Rosangela remembers that meeting with Adele very fondly. Though the program was in its early days of global expansion, Rosangela was already grappling with how to spread the importance of animal welfare to farmers and ranchers who had been raising animals for generations.
“I asked her, ‘Adele, how much can I actually share knowledge or help them to understand animal welfare in practice?’” Rosangela said. “I remember clearly that she said, ‘I want Certified Humane to be an educational program.’”
From her position on the committee, Rosangela began helping establish the standards in Portuguese and Spanish. With every new language added to the program, the team seeks out a native animal welfare scientist who understands English well to help translate the standards.
But translating the words is just part of the global growth. Even today, animal welfare is an evolving science, Rosangela said. Convincing farmers and ranchers of the value of the Farm Animal Standards can be an uphill battle.
“In Latin America, it’s more about breaking through their old perceptions and confronting the taboos of some in the industry,” Rosangela said. “If you can show them all the possible outcomes that you can gain from the animals’ perspective and also from the economical perspective, you win the game.
“And then it’s easy,” she added.
For her part, Rosangela said she’s glad she’s been able to uphold Adele’s original vision.
“Certified Humane has been playing a very important role globally. We’re not only auditing and certifying the industry; we’re spreading animal welfare in an educational way,” she said.
Along with Portuguese and Spanish, Farm Animal Standards are now available in French, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The global phenomenon
While Certified Humane® had already expanded from the United States into Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, Rosangela helped promote the Farm Animal Standards across southeast Asia — including Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and recently, Thailand.
Today, Rosangela oversees about 22 inspectors across the world, providing technical and scientific guidance as they work in the field. The team is growing as consumer demand for humane animal welfare practices catches on in more countries.
A few years ago, Rosangela’s most senior inspector traveled from Chile to Malaysia to train a new team of inspectors. Over the summer, Rosangela had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam with the same task. Last year, she was in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
“Promoting farm animal welfare is an ongoing mission,” she said.
Overseeing the inspection team — and staying ahead of global science and the industry innovations — requires constant learning and communication.
“They can be on the other side of the world doing audits, and they’ll send me pictures and messages: ‘What do you think about this? What do you think about that?’” Rosangela explained. “Then we are communicating almost in real time.”
In November, Rosangela is hosting a workshop to launch a Certified Humane® program in Japan (right now, Certified Humane® products are available for purchase in Japan, but no farms are certified there). She’s also traveling to India soon to broaden farm animal welfare and strengthen Certified Humane® mission in that country.
After almost 20 years of involvement in the organization, Rosangela is more committed than ever to advancing the movement.
“Certified Humane is my heart,” Rosangela said. “You couldn’t break me from Certified Humane. It’s such a history that you can’t.”
How Dr. Rosangela Poletto helped grow Certified Humane® into a global movement
Posted: October 21, 2024 by Certified Humane®
The Certified Humane® program began as a counter to the abysmal conditions on North American factory farms. It was designed to empower the North American shoppers to weigh in on how they wanted farm animals to be treated — through their purchasing power.
Adele Douglass Jolley, the founder of Certified Humane®, never imagined how the program would grow on such a global scale.
The reason it did so is largely because a Brazilian animal welfare researcher — studying for her doctorate at Purdue University in 2005 — decided to lend her expertise as an inspector for the burgeoning program.
“I needed to be in touch with the animals in the real world,” said Rosangela Poletto, Ph.D., DVM, who later became a member of the Scientific Committee.
Today, Certified Humane® products are sold in 26+ countries. Rosangela and her growing team of inspectors around the globe audit farms and ranches using the program’s rigorous Farm Animal Standards.
The program has exploded in global growth in part because Rosangela never compromised the program’s high standards. Even as it expanded from Brazil, to Argentina, to Peru, throughout Latin America, now to southeast Asia, including India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia.
“Without Rosangela, it would have never happened,” said Mimi Stein, Executive Director of Certified Humane®. “She enforced the program. She makes sure the program doesn’t lose integrity as we grow.”
Dr. Rosangela is now the organization’s Director of Science and Research. When she’s not globetrotting to promote the welfare of farm animals on behalf of Certified Humane®, she’s raising three boys (ages 15, 11 and 4) and teaching at the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
And she’s just getting started.
“I do what I love, and I love to help people to improve the animals’ lives,” she said. “That’s why I never stopped. It’s my passion for everything.”
From the dairy farm to vet school
Rosangela grew up in a small town called Marau in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s most southern state, which sits along the border with Uruguay.
Her family raised dairy cows, horses, and beef cattle on the family farm. Rosangela would help produce and sell pasteurized milk in liter bags to local stores. She always cared for her own dogs at home.
Rosangela would often wash the cows’ water trough, give them fresh water, and then sit back to watch how the cows meandered back to the trough to drink.
“I was just passionate about providing them proper care and observing how they behaved,” Rosangela said.
As she prepared to go to college, she considered both medical school and veterinary school. But on her way to register for classes at the university, she remembers telling her mom that she couldn’t see herself working enclosed between four walls day in and day out.
“I just need to be around the animals,” she said.
Rosangela enrolled in veterinarian school in 1997. She threw herself into her studies, taking extra English classes, studying Italian at a private school and working in the vet hospital lab.
The neurophysiology of piglets
Despite her obsession with watching how animals behaved, Rosangela never thought of studying animal welfare. At the time, that type of science wasn’t a big focus in Latin America.
Rosangela’s perspective changed during her last semester of vet school as she was seeking a final internship to complete her program. One of her professors helped her connect with the animal science department at Michigan State University — and specifically to Brazilian professor Adroaldo Zanella.
Her internship focused on the neurophysiology of piglets, studying how early weaning and social isolation affected their brains. She explored how this dynamic of their care impacted their cortisol mechanism and their ability to manage stress.
“I never thought of myself becoming keen about brain function and its relation to animal welfare in my life,” Rosangela said. “And I loved it.”
After graduating from vet school in 2003, professor Adroaldo Zanella invited her back to Michigan State for a master’s program. That, in turn, led to an invitation to pursue a doctorate — advised by Dr. Jeremy Marchant and Dr. Heng-wei Cheng — at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Livestock Behavior Research Unit based at Purdue University.
In 2005, she moved from Michigan to West Lafayette, Indiana to continue her research at the USDA’s only research unit focused on animal welfare.
The call to the farms
Rosangela first heard about the (brand new) Certified Humane® program while studying at Michigan State. A postdoc fellow she worked with, the late Kirsty Laughlin, left their program to help Adele launch the nonprofit, Humane Farm Animal Care.
At Purdue, Rosangela began to feel what had kept her pursuing a career in medicine: the walls of her research lab were too confining.
“I really loved doing research, but I felt that I needed to go back to the farms,” she said.
In 2005, she reached out to Certified Humane® to offer her expertise as an inspector. Her training involved shadowing Brenda Coe, Ph.D., on a robotic milking operation in Pennsylvania as well as Jose Peralta, Ph.D., DVM, who now works as a professor at Western University of Health Science in California.
For five years, she audited farms that cared for pigs and dairy cows across the United States as she finished her doctorate research.
In 2010, having completed a Ph.D. in behavioral neurophysiology focused on farm animal welfare and a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine, she moved back to Brazil. However, her association with Certified Humane® was far from over.
Just as she arrived back in Brazil, Rosangela got a call from the Certified Humane® main office in Virginia. Certified Humane® already had a collaboration with an organic certification program in Brazil. Now, a producer in Nebraska wanted their butter to be certified. The milk they used came from a dairy farm in Argentina.
So Rosangela traveled to her neighboring country to audit the dairy farm. Then she audited a few laying hen farms in Brazil, then in Argentina. Later, she audited farms in Peru and Uruguay.
Up to that point, Rosangela was the only Certified Humane® inspector in Latin America. But even that was about to change.
Promoting animal welfare to the world
In 2011, Adele asked Rosangela to join the Scientific Committee. Adele had traveled to attend a conference in Brazil and met Rosangela in person for the first time.
Rosangela remembers that meeting with Adele very fondly. Though the program was in its early days of global expansion, Rosangela was already grappling with how to spread the importance of animal welfare to farmers and ranchers who had been raising animals for generations.
“I asked her, ‘Adele, how much can I actually share knowledge or help them to understand animal welfare in practice?’” Rosangela said. “I remember clearly that she said, ‘I want Certified Humane to be an educational program.’”
From her position on the committee, Rosangela began helping establish the standards in Portuguese and Spanish. With every new language added to the program, the team seeks out a native animal welfare scientist who understands English well to help translate the standards.
But translating the words is just part of the global growth. Even today, animal welfare is an evolving science, Rosangela said. Convincing farmers and ranchers of the value of the Farm Animal Standards can be an uphill battle.
“In Latin America, it’s more about breaking through their old perceptions and confronting the taboos of some in the industry,” Rosangela said. “If you can show them all the possible outcomes that you can gain from the animals’ perspective and also from the economical perspective, you win the game.
“And then it’s easy,” she added.
For her part, Rosangela said she’s glad she’s been able to uphold Adele’s original vision.
“Certified Humane has been playing a very important role globally. We’re not only auditing and certifying the industry; we’re spreading animal welfare in an educational way,” she said.
Along with Portuguese and Spanish, Farm Animal Standards are now available in French, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The global phenomenon
While Certified Humane® had already expanded from the United States into Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, Rosangela helped promote the Farm Animal Standards across southeast Asia — including Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and recently, Thailand.
Today, Rosangela oversees about 22 inspectors across the world, providing technical and scientific guidance as they work in the field. The team is growing as consumer demand for humane animal welfare practices catches on in more countries.
A few years ago, Rosangela’s most senior inspector traveled from Chile to Malaysia to train a new team of inspectors. Over the summer, Rosangela had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam with the same task. Last year, she was in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
“Promoting farm animal welfare is an ongoing mission,” she said.
Overseeing the inspection team — and staying ahead of global science and the industry innovations — requires constant learning and communication.
“They can be on the other side of the world doing audits, and they’ll send me pictures and messages: ‘What do you think about this? What do you think about that?’” Rosangela explained. “Then we are communicating almost in real time.”
In November, Rosangela is hosting a workshop to launch a Certified Humane® program in Japan (right now, Certified Humane® products are available for purchase in Japan, but no farms are certified there). She’s also traveling to India soon to broaden farm animal welfare and strengthen Certified Humane® mission in that country.
After almost 20 years of involvement in the organization, Rosangela is more committed than ever to advancing the movement.
“Certified Humane is my heart,” Rosangela said. “You couldn’t break me from Certified Humane. It’s such a history that you can’t.”
Category: bios, Blog