Day 108 - 27 Mar 95 - Page 27
1 first one had to be put down the rest went to an RSPCA
2 sanctuary which then existed in Huddersfield, and they did
3 not last very long because the essence of the broiler
4 chicken is unless you half starve it, give it roughly 50
5 per cent feed restriction, when it grows up, it dies of
6 generally heart attacks.
7
8 Q. Was that the bird that was shown in this leaflet, was that
9 the one you are referring to, or was that another?
10 A. Is that in the insert? Yes, that is the one.
11
12 Q. There is actually a copy of this in the documents but it is
13 a photocopy. There are some spare originals, so have you a
14 copy up there?
15 A. I do not think so.
16
17 Q. (Handed) Could you say whether any of those are the
18 chickens you were referring to?
19 A. That one on the top inside cover is that one, that we
20 had to have put down because he was so badly deformed. The
21 ones on the bottom right-hand one were, well, obviously, it
22 is a supermarket bird on the left, and it was some dead,
23 already slaughtered, birds that we bought from the
24 slaughter house to investigate their feet, because usually
25 nobody sees the feet of chickens at any stage, apart from
26 the farmer or the slaughterer. We were interested and
27 found, of course, many with severely ulcerated feet which
28 very often goes with the burnt hocks but, generally, the
29 consumer will only see the burnt hocks.
30
31 Q. The birds that are shown and also the hock burn and the
32 ulcerated feet, would you only get that in one or two units
33 or is that fairly standard across the industry?
34 A. No, it is very, very common. It is less common now,
35 and I hope it is because of our campaign -- I hope they are
36 not just being hidden. For instance, very reputable
37 supermarkets, say, eight years ago, or seven, six years
38 ago, you might have seen a whole row of burnt hocks quite
39 severe, and I have seen this repeatedly in companies like
40 Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencers. We alerted our members,
41 we did a lot of letter writing campaigns which is one of
42 the things we encourage, and people began to know what it
43 meant, which they did not before; they had no idea
44 sometimes. They are so severe they are actually scraped
45 off and you see a kind of circle of raw flesh, and this is
46 because they were so bad that they were considered
47 unsightly.
48
49 We have read in Poultry World, and such journals, that now
50 that producers are penalised if they send in more than five
51 per cent of hock burns, and so there is a financial
52 incentive to improve the environment/index.html">litter quality.
53
54 Q. That is something that is affected by environment/index.html">litter, yes?
55 A. Yes.
56
57 Q. As far as you are aware, the standards across the industry,
58 not necessarily every farm, but the industry in general,
59 have been improving over the last five or six years?
60 A. I think in that respect there has been improvement,
