In the movie Big Fish, the main character looks into a witch’s eye and sees how he dies. Armed with this information, he is able to live life to the fullest knowing no matter what he does, he will survive because he knows how the story ends. Unfortunately, you don’t have the opportunity to look into a witch’s eye and see how the story ends. Instead, you have to guess by using a process called a hazard vulnerability assessment of HVA for short. But, before you start deciding which hazards pose the greatest threat to your community, first test out this process on an animal that occupies one of the lowest rungs of the food chain…the mighty interesting, but extremely vulnerable, chicken. Grab your pitchfork, muck boots, and a pair of rugged jeans because you are about to talk chicken.
Task
Before starting your paper, read the community profile to gain more understanding of your community.
Part 1
Design a risk assessment tool to assess the general threats to your chickens. You will do this on a global level focusing on the threats based on the community where you live.
Part 2
Use your risk assessment that you developed for part 1 to identify which of the threats is the most likely to be stealing the lives of your chickens. To do this, rank your threats in numerical order from most likely to least likely.
As you develop your tool and perform your risk assessment don’t forget to use both historical information (Internet search) and subject matter expert information (outlined in the community profile).
Your paper should be 2 to 3 pages and must discuss how you arrived at your conclusion in ranking your top five threats. The objective is to understand your thought process to ensure that your logic is sound and cogent (fancy way of saying correct).
And remember, the safety and welfare of all your chickens rides on your ability to accurately assess and predict risks.
Submit both your assessment tool and short paper via the Dropbox. If you would like, you can combine them into a single document. However, make sure that you don’t count your assessment in the paper page count. It is imperative that you document your thought process in your paper.
Purpose
The purpose of this assignment is to create a fun way to assess hazards, risks, and vulnerabilities and apply this assessment to a real situation. You could talk about how to apply this to your community but that isn’t nearly as fun as talking about chickens! Smaller things are often easier to assess than large ambiguous things such as a city, county, or state. And these assessments already exist online but a chicken risk assessment tool, now that is new!
End State
What does success look like? To be successful you should do the following things:
- Develop a risk assessment tool and submit it as either a standalone document or a part of your paper.
- Perform a risk assessment on your chicken operation using the tool you developed.
- Identify the top 5 risks to your chicken operation.
- Discuss the thought process that led you to arrive at your risk-based conclusion. Document this process in a 2 to 3-page paper. If you combine your paper with your risk assessment tool, the assessment tool doesn’t count towards your paper length requirement. For example, if your assessment tool is one-page in length, you don’t need another single page to meet the requirement, you still need two-pages.
- Use Internet research (historical information) and information from your subject matter experts (SMEs) to help guide you in your assessment. Discuss how the SME and historical information helped or confused your decision making process.
- Use appropriate APA citations where applicable and necessary.
- Use at least two external sources for your paper.
- Use the community profile to assist you with your assessment.
- The paper will be submitted on time through the Unit 3 Assignment Dropbox.
