Day 288 - 28 Oct 96 - Page 41
1 On day 102, did I give the reference for that already?
2
3 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Not to what he accepted about Mr. Bruton.
4 No.
5
6 MS. STEEL: It is day 102, page 15, starts at line 1, the
7 question starts at line 1. On the same page, at line 49,
8 Mr. Rampton asked about "leaving aside the effects of
9 gumboro disease, for that period on average how many birds
10 would be expected to be found dead in a shed of twenty or
11 25,000 at the time of catching". Dr. Patteson answered,
12 "At the time of catching at the end of the flock the
13 figure would be 30 or 40, and it could be as many as 50",
14 which is the figure which is quoted here.
15
16 I cannot actually find the heat stress original part,
17 talking about the levels of death from heat stress, but
18 I have just got a note that Dr. Patteson did say that heat
19 stress deaths were higher before the hot weather system was
20 introduced in 1993. And he said that on day 89, page 18,
21 line 43.
22
23 Dr. Patteson said that currently -- or, well, it was
24 currently when he was giving evidence, around ten percent
25 of birds had hock burns to varying degrees. That was on
26 day 90, page 47, line 50. He said that it used to be 20
27 percent of birds, that is, one fifth of all birds reared by
28 the company suffered from hock burns. He gave evidence
29 about -- and this is one of the points you were asking
30 about earlier -- how much difference there was between the
31 unit that Dr. Gregory inspected and the typical Sun Valley
32 unit. Dr. Patteson said that Sun Valley had tried out new
33 cup drinkers about six or seven years ago and had been
34 progressively replacing the old bell drinker's over the
35 last five years.
36
37 That was day 90, page 38, line 48. He said the main
38 benefit is that it reduces spillage of water on to the
39 environment/index.html">litter, which was a feature of the bell drinkers. That was
40 really highly undesirable because the maintenance of good
41 environment/index.html">litter was of prime importance to the birds. It was of
42 prime importance to the birds to maintain dry and friable
43 material for them to walk around on and lie in and the bell
44 drinkers are the drinkers which are shown in the photograph
45 which I took of the Sun Valley unit, and it is apparent
46 from Dr. Patteson's evidence that at the time of the
47 alleged libel the vast majority of the Sun Valley units
48 were using those bell drinkers which had the highly
49 undesirable feature, or the highly undesirable problem, of
50 water spillage, which obviously leads to cat environment/index.html">litter which
51 leads to worse leg problems, hock burns and sores.
52
53 MR. JUSTICE BELL: When did you take your pictures, again, can
54 you remind me?
55
56 MS. STEEL: March 1991, I think it was. It was definitely
57 1991, Spring, but I think it was March. Dr. Patteson also
58 related on day 89, page 36, about how the food had been
59 changed for the chickens which had resulted in improvements
60 to the environment/index.html">litter, because he said that "there are certain raw
