Maple Lodge Farms Ltd. has lost in a marathon court case
that establishes a precedent for scores of charges the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency has filed against the company over trucking chickens to its processing
plants in Ontario and New Brunswick.
Justice N.S. Kastner found that Maple Lodge was not
sufficiently diligent to protect the welfare of two truckloads of birds. One
was 9.576 broilers, of which 711 died (7.4 per cent) before processing at the
plant near Brampton.
They were picked up on Dec. 30, 2008, in the midst of a snow
storm. The birds at the top of the flatbed tractor-trailer load got wet before
the tarp was secured and then they were hauled more than 100 kilometres through
the cold and stormy weather and then sat in a cold holding barn at the plant
until they were processed on New Year’s Eve.
A second load was spent hens from a 45,000-bird barn near
Moorefield owned by Gray Ridge Eggs, part of an family-run business that’s one
of Canada’s largest egg-farming, egg-grading and egg-processing conglomerates.
The trucker says the hens were in poor condition when they
were loaded on a cold and windy day, Feb. 23, 2009. Of 10,944 hens on the load,
1,181 died in transit. They were loaded in temperatures of minus 15 to 16 and
trucked through weather at minus nine.
Three veterinarians testified for the Canadian Food
Inspection Agency and Kastner chose to give more credence to their evidence
than to Dr. Rachael Ouckama, a staff veterinarian for Maple Lodge’s hatchery
division.
Kastner said he does not doubt Oukema’s honesty, but figures she
might be biased in favour of her employer.
He praised both lawyers for presenting such a complex case so well - Ron Folkes for Maple Lodge and Damien Frost for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Frost argued that Maple Lodge was negligent
in trucking the broilers because the birds were wet before the truck left the
farm, they were hauled through freezing weather and a snow storm, the wet and
cold birds were held too long in a cold barn before processing began and there
was no thermometer inside the load to monitor temperature.
The driver also
failed to check the load hourly as required by the company’s standard operating
procedures.
In the case of the spent hens, he argued that they should
never have been loaded in such cold weather, especially since they were fragile
birds.
Folkes and Oukema countered that the
company has tried leaving the top and side rows of crates empty for trucking in
inclement weather, but found it doesn’t work, that the company is keenly
interested in bird welfare because it loses money if birds die in transit and
that it must keep operating in inclement weather because the plant accounts for
98 to 99 per cent of the processing of spent hens and 24 to 30 per cent of
Ontario’s broiler chickens.
The driver also argued that leaving the spent hens at the Gray Ridge barn was not an option because they would have died of starvation and freezing in the unheated barn.
The company said it has since installed solid, but flexible,
rooves on its transport trailers with leverage to adjust ventilation and it is
using dolly modules to gather spent hens, thereby reducing handling stress.
In New Brunswick it operates Nadeau Poultry.
Maple Lodge faces another 58 counts and those are now up for
consideration after this test case involving two types of chickens.
This court proceeding began Sept. 9, 2011, and continued for
two more days in September, one in October and one in November, then more days
in January, February, May, August and October, 2012, and on June 23 this year.
Written submissions were presented on Jan. 18 and additional oral submissions
on Jan. 29 this year.
Besides these cases, Maple Lodge and Nadeau Poultry have been fined tens of
thousands of dollars for trucking violations of animal-welfare standards that
are enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
