Day 073 - 13 Jan 95 - Page 49


     
     1        would justify any great amount of research or work to be
     2        done.
     3
     4        Mr. Walker will be a somewhat longer witness, no doubt
     5        because of the Vesty Brazil question principally.  My Lord,
     6        I am anxious that we should not, as your Lordship has just
     7        indicated, suddenly find that Christmas 1995 is merely a
     8        staging post and that we are going to be looking at June
     9        1996 as the terminous of this case.
    10
    11        Your Lordship has been, I would readily grant, I make no
    12        complaint about it, generous to the Defendants in point of
    13        time for preparation.  I do not accept they have always
    14        made the best use of that time.  I would say that if they
    15        are not ready to deal with Mr. Chambers on Monday, 23rd
    16        January, then the fact must be that they have, largely
    17        speaking, wasted the last three weeks on something other
    18        than the preparation of this case.
    19
    20   MS. STEEL:  On the subject of whether animals and food poisoning
    21        have been up and running prior to this and whether we have
    22        had time to prepare, firstly, I do not believe that before
    23        Dr. Gregory gave evidence we were given any time for
    24        preparing on that issue; if we were, it was at most a day
    25        and we had our expert witnesses in court behind us
    26        prompting us the questions to ask.  We were not actually
    27        fully prepared for that; we had not read all the
    28        documentation.  I should add that we do not know that our
    29        experts will be able to be sitting behind us to prompt us
    30        for Mr. Chambers and Mr. Walker.  So, it is very important
    31        that we do get some preparation time.
    32
    33        Mr. Oakley had nothing in his statement about animal
    34        welfare, from what I can remember, and I believe that I did
    35        raise this as an objection at the time because it was not
    36        something we had prepared for.  So we did, as I remember,
    37        do that off the top of our heads.  I do not think for that
    38        we looked into the documentation either.
    39
    40        Mr. Gonzales was very general and he was also mostly about
    41        America.  I believe that most of the documentation we have
    42        got relates to the UK.  So, we have not been through and
    43        read all that thoroughly.  In any event, that which we have
    44        read, which is not all of it, we do need to be able to
    45        re-read and prepare separate and different questions for
    46        the witnesses that are coming up.
    47
    48        As far as we are concerned, we do this, we do see this as
    49        coming on to a separate issue and, although food poisoning
    50        and animal welfare have been amalgamated, they are two 
    51        separate areas in the sense they both have quite 
    52        substantial quantities of documentation involving figures 
    53        and things like that, and things that do require quite a
    54        bit of concentration to be properly prepared on.
    55
    56   MR. MORRIS:  I just want to reassure Mr. Rampton that I do not
    57        waste one minute of my time.  I have not wasted one minute
    58        of my time for the last two and a half years -- I only wish
    59        I could, to be honest -- and I do have responsibilities
    60        which I cannot avoid.

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