This preprint describes the establishment of LIGHThouse (Livestock Integrated Governance & Health Network), a Western Canada livestock governance initiative operating as a species-sector node within the Collaborative Operational Response Integration Network (CORIN) under the Community Network Integration (CNI) framework. LIGHThouse is designed to move livestock health management beyond episodic containment of infectious disease events toward a continuous, quality-managed governance architecture integrating: Acute outbreak response Endemic disease optimization Production performance and welfare metrics Traceability system evaluation Trade stability and risk reduction Structured stakeholder collaboration Building upon previously published outbreak response best-practice frameworks (Wilson et al., 2024) and prior CNI applications within commercial poultry and ratite systems, this initiative extends those principles to beef cattle, cervids (with initial focus on chronic wasting disease), and equine sectors in Western Canada, with explicit scalability to national and cross-border contexts. The governance architecture emphasizes: Epidemiologic rigor grounded in established field epidemiology principles Transparent yet confidentiality-protective data governance Performance-based evaluation of interventions and technologies Structured sponsor participation without governance capture Alignment of producers, veterinarians, industry stakeholders, and policy actors LIGHThouse does not replace statutory regulatory authority. Rather, it operates as a coordination and quality management layer upstream of enforcement, generating evidence, performance metrics, and collaborative structures that are inteended to inform the evolution of more integrated and coherent livestock governance systems over time. The initiative includes a structured environment for the evaluation of therapeutics, biologics, diagnostics, vaccines, nutrition strategies, and other management technologies under rigorously designed field and pilot frameworks. Such evaluations may inform regulatory submissions, policy refinement, or industry adoption decisions, operating within existing statutory approval structures. This preprint describes a governance initiative currently under development and is released to establish architectural transparency, invite stakeholder engagement, and document the foundational design of the LIGHThouse model.
Wilson et al. (Sun,) studied this question.