Day 291 - 31 Oct 96 - Page 10
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2 On the next page he refers to the piglets, when the piglets
3 are taken away it was a cause of stress as well as
4 distress, and about the family groupings of pigs. I will
5 not read it all out.
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7 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No, as long as you give me the topic, I can
8 make sure whether I am covering that topic.
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10 MS. STEEL: And in terms of keeping pigs indoors all their
11 lives, the welfare implications of that, he said -- this is
12 on page 32: "What you have described is certainly
13 uncongenial circumstances and I think that a welfarist
14 would want to see animals or human beings kept in congenial
15 circumstances". So that is one point.
16 He went on to say that there would be frustration and lack
17 of space.
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19 Actually, on that page as well, there is more about the
20 pigs fighting because of the crowded conditions. On page
21 44 Mr. Long was asked about the effect of transport on
22 animals again, and he said that the process of being
23 transported -- well, it was about the comparison between
24 about whether it was stressful or whether the levels of
25 stress would only be the same as a human being making a
26 journey. He made the point that obviously a human being
27 generally would know where they are going to and, you know,
28 what was going to happen when they got there, or roughly
29 what was going to happen when they got there.
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31 He said: "Now, an animal is frightened, even to the point
32 of being terrified, if not certainly mystified, by all of
33 this. It has no idea what is going to be at the end of
34 this unpleasant experience. So, that is chronic stress.
35 To those of us who follow behaviour, that is a particularly
36 harsh form of treatment. It is almost like, sort of, a
37 form of torture. They do not know how they can get away,
38 how they can escape. There are all sorts of unfamiliar
39 surroundings."
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41 Then he goes on to describe the general conditions on the
42 lorries, as causing stress in any event. (Pause)
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44 Just with reference to what we were discussing earlier
45 about improper stunning and so on - this is on page 46 of
46 day 114 - he was saying that it was difficult to establish
47 if you did not have all the equipment there whether or not
48 the pig had been stunned properly. And that he was worried
49 that if Bowes, for example, were not using 1.3 amps then
50 there was a much bigger chance that the pigs would not be
51 stunned properly.
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53 And he said that he went to a demonstration once of the use
54 of the tongs and it was shown that about one in four of the
55 use of the tongs led to an imperfect stun. That was being
56 done with the use of laboratory equipment in the slaughter
57 house. He said: "So, they had to be done again or they had
58 to be given longer. The problem also is that in a rush in
59 a slaughter house, if you use a lower amperage, say, you
60 have to give it seven seconds, is the slaughterman going to
