Day 108 - 27 Mar 95 - Page 26
1 normally. If you can take it steadily and try and remember
2 to keep your voice up?
3 A. Yes, I am sorry.
4
5 MS. STEEL: When did the full extent, or when did you get a
6 particular idea of the extent of the welfare problems of
7 broilers?
8 A. Really by chance. It was a hot spell in the summer of
9 1984 and I was driving through my local town, which is in a
10 country area, and I noticed a white chicken by the side of
11 the road which nobody else was retrieving and I stopped. I
12 was with my daughter at the time. We stopped and we
13 retrieved the bird, which the first impression I had was
14 that it smelt of appalling, and so I decided to stop at a
15 chemist shop and buy some Dettol, knowing that I would want
16 to wash it when I got home.
17
18 When I came back from the shop my daughter, who had been
19 holding the bird, was horrified because the bird had been
20 turning round, preening her rear end and returning with a
21 beak full of maggots each time. We tried to go straight to
22 a vetinary surgeon locally who was not there. We took the
23 bird home and washed her in a solution of Dettol, and
24 dozens and possibly hundreds of maggots came out of the
25 rear end of this bird.
26
27 Clearly, she had to go to the vet and, no doubt, be put
28 down. We made a vet's appointment, like within the next
29 hour, and I said to the veterinary surgeon: "Is this very
30 unusual?" He said: "No, it will not be unusual in the
31 sheds in this hot weather", or similar words, which alerted
32 us to the problem. From that day, I decided to find out
33 more about the broiler system.
34
35 Q. How did you go about investigating the broiler industry?
36 A. I first of all wrote to David Polycott who was the
37 poultry specialist at Leeds ADAS, Ministry of Agriculture,
38 and I sent a kind of short questionnaire asking the basic
39 outline of the industry, such as typical flock size,
40 stocking density, mortality reasons, etc., and he replied
41 helpfully. That formed a basis on which to work. Then we
42 started our well-worn habit of buying birds when we could.
43 However, this is much harder with broiler chickens.
44
45 Q. I was looking to see if I can find the letter from the
46 MAFF, but I am not sure where it is. Sorry, if you want to
47 continue with the research that you took up?
48 A. We were able to buy some chickens that were being
49 caught and transported in daylight, which was fairly
50 unusual, I think.
51
52 We just happened to turn up by chance and we bought half a
53 dozen, and came home and found that they had severe --
54 well, one had extremely severely deformed feet -- this was
55 birds of six or seven weeks, seven weeks probably, male,
56 some of them were males -- and we had to have that one put
57 down because the vet said it could not fend for itself.
58 Most of them were deformed to some extent. They were
59 ungainly to a degree. We used those four photographs and
60 observing them. I think that was the batch that after the
