Day 291 - 31 Oct 96 - Page 25
1 cattle in relation to the prevalence of imperfect stuns
2 were that it causes pain and suffering. He said: "That is
3 an obvious question of ill-fare rather than welfare."
4
5 On page 54, Mr. Long was asked to summarise the life of
6 cattle destined for slaughter for beef and he
7 said: "I would say that it is quite needless and relentless
8 exploitation." (Pause) Obviously, in relation to slaughter
9 of animals in general, he said that litanies of
10 recommendations and efforts at reform continue to give the
11 lie to 'humane killing' as an honest description.
12
13 On day 115, page 32, talking about the stress of the
14 stunning process and prior to the stunning, he said: "If
15 the animal is in the stunning box, it is a metal box with a
16 lot of noise and a gate comes down behind it. Now, often
17 that startles the animal, it backs into it and makes a lot
18 more noise. There is an animal just waiting behind to come
19 in and that startles the next animal. Now, technically,
20 the one behind cannot actually see the one in front but it
21 is still being frightened by the noise and the commotion
22 that is caused by what is going on with the one in front."
23
24 I think this is the last one for Dr. Long, which I think
25 was, sort of, partly covered this morning with a similar
26 reference anyway. On day 115, page 33, line 12, I asked
27 him: "Two days ago there was a reference made to the
28 indications of an effective captive bolt stun. In your
29 experience do the people in the slaughter house have
30 sufficient time to carry out these tests and observations
31 to check for effective stunning?". And he said: "No".
32
33 Moving on to Mr. Lyman, who was raised on a four generation
34 farm, or farm and ranch, in Montana and was the owner of
35 the Lyman Ranch and Lyman Cattle Company from 1965 to 1983,
36 which was one of the top five percent in size farms, and
37 obviously he had a great deal of experience of the cattle
38 rearing and slaughter industry. He said that the most
39 cattle, or the maximum number of cattle that he had had at
40 any one time was 1,000 cows and calves and 5,000 head
41 feedlot. He said: "So at one time I would have as many as
42 7,000 head of cattle", and obviously he was also growing
43 the food to feed the cattle, grain and so on.
44
45 He had visited thousands of farms, he said. This was on
46 page 4. He said he had probably visited thousands of
47 different farms, met with thousands of different farmers.
48 This was whilst he was a senior lobbyist for the National
49 Farmers Union between 1987 and 1992. He also said he had
50 been to hundreds of slaughter houses and probably as many
51 as 50 processing plants, and the hundreds of slaughter
52 houses which he had visited included companies that
53 supplied McDonald's.
54
55 He said that the slaughter houses that he had visited which
56 supplied McDonald's were basically typical of the industry
57 as a whole, and he referred specifically to one, which was
58 Monfort in Colorado, which was one where he actually
59 supplied meat to. He said that he believed he visited
60 about 50 of the slaughter houses which supplied
