Day 217 - 09 02 96 - Page 15
DAY 217
MRS. HOVI, Examined:
1 Q. What was the reason for having one person assigned to that
2 specifically?
3 A. When I started working at Jarrets, there was a person
4 whose duty was to clean the bins, but he also had duties
5 insides the abattoir, sometimes trimming off the spinal
6 cords of the carcasses, dealing with the fat bins from the
7 fat trimming area, and so on, and this was totally
8 unacceptable, to have a person who worked in the dirty side
9 of the abattoir to enter the slaughter hall at all. That
10 is not normal practice in any abattoir I have worked at
11 before.
12
13 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
14
15 MR. MORRIS: Mr. Bone, in paragraph 18, does say that it would
16 be impossible to push the bins through the line when there
17 are carcasses on the line. That is on page 10.
18 A. Well, in my opinion, it would have been. It was
19 difficult and it meant touching the carcasses; both the men
20 who were touching the dirty bin and the bin itself which
21 was dirty would touching the consider carcasses. It was,
22 if not impossible, unacceptable.
23
24 I think we have dealt with paragraph number 19 already,
25 concerning the separation of the dirty and the clean side
26 as well. So I would like to go on to paragraph number 20,
27 starting on page 10.
28
29 As I stated in my previous evidence, the man -- if we could
30 go back on the map again and look at the man who is
31 situated where the bleed hoist, right at the beginning of
32 the slaughter line, on the left hand side of the slaughter;
33 that man was the man who also stunned the cattle, and his
34 other duty was to come down, hook the animal's back leg,
35 hoist it up and hit the animal, which is a procedure where
36 a pithing rod, a flexible rod, is stuck through the
37 animal's brain, so that the connection between the spinal
38 cords and central nervous system is severed, and this
39 prevents kicking and movement of the carcass during the
40 bleeding. He did this.
41
42 He took the pithing rod from the wall between the water
43 pipes, where it was kept; he did all this, and then he
44 split the skin of the carcass where it was supposed to be
45 stuck. He did not -- fortunately, in my opinion, do the
46 actual bleeding of the animal, because that would have
47 meant that he would have put a dirty hand and a dirty knife
48 inside the animal.
49
50 The bleeding, itself, happened in the corner, where at the
51 moment there is no person there in this particular picture,
52 but right in the corner -----
53
54 Q. Sorry, the bleeding took place in that corner?
55 A. In that corner. There was a man standing there. There
56 was just enough room for a man to stand there. Otherwise,
57 the carcasses came fairly close to the wall, where there it
58 says "blood trough".
59
60 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Where is that?
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