Day 113 - 03 Apr 95 - Page 59
1 A. The whole system.
2
3 Q. --- system.
4 A. And needing cheap food and sacrificing the sow, because
5 after she has had five farrowings in two years she is
6 really like the culled cow; she has been exhausted, she is
7 weary and, in fact, the trade will take her then as a cast
8 or culled sow. So she only lasts for five farrowings over
9 two years. That is the standard.
10
11 Q. So she lives to about how old?
12 A. Well, she comes into production at about six or eight
13 months, and so she has two years of farrowing. Her total
14 age would be two and a half, roughly.
15
16 Q. What age do, well, should pigs live to?
17 A. Well ----
18
19 Q. In a normal ----
20 A. As far as can I tell, there are not many wild swine one
21 can investigate now, but certainly they should get into
22 their twenties.
23
24 Q. Do you have pigs on your farm?
25 A. No, we do not. We have confined ourselves to
26 ruminants.
27
28 Q. I am not dealing with things in any sensible order really.
29 What particular practices with pigs concern you, apart from
30 the things you have mentioned, concern you regarding pigs'
31 welfare?
32 A. I will go back first of all five or seven years; you
33 have asked me to do that several times. I would single out
34 castration. That was common in male pigs at the time five
35 or seven years ago. That was really to prevent a complaint
36 called boretaint that affects taint development in meat and
37 butchers were very scared about that. That has been
38 reduced. That has also been prompted by welfare interests
39 because there was a barbarous process of castration on the
40 pigs and it was not popular with the industry, because if
41 you had a pig who was going to be slaughtered at 22 weeks
42 and you took a week out while it was recovering from the
43 castration, that was obviously a loss of profit. So,
44 although castration, emasculation, is still done, it is
45 less.
46
47 Q. When you say ----
48
49 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, I am sorry to intervene but this is not
50 the first time this has happened. At any rate until very
51 recently the only supplier, or virtually the only supplier,
52 of pig meat to McDonald's or for McDonald's was G.D. Bowes
53 & Sons (Norfolk). I do not know if this gentleman knows
54 that establishment, but this is one case in point. His
55 unchallenged evidence was they that had not castrated any
56 pigs since the early 1970s, so what the value of this
57 evidence is I am not at all sure.
58
59 MS. STEEL: Mr. Bowes said that approximately 60 per cent of
60 factory production were bought in from all over the
