The Sunday Times reported in its issue yesterday (12.2.12) that a Norfolk pig farm, Harling Farm in Harling, Norfolk, was guilty of “long term neglect” of animals and that an undercover video showed “animals with weeping sores, hernias and festering deep wounds”. The video also showed handlers beating pigs to death with iron bars, kicking piglets and smashing animals hed first on to concrete floors.”

The farm is a member of the Red Tractor Farm Assurance scheme which is intended to uphold high standards of animal welfare and farming systems.

In a response to the Sunday Times Article David Clarke, Chief Executive of Assured Food Standards (Red Tractor) said, “The behaviour shown on the video has no place within the assurance scheme and we completely condemn it.  As soon as we were alerted to the issue on Friday of last week we immediately removed the farm from the scheme on the basis of the video evidence and we have had an inspector on the farm during the weekend.

UK pig farmers have some of the highest standards in Europe and such incidents, although rare, simply cannot be tolerated. We are saddened that all of the hard work that our farmers do to uphold the standards could be undermined by one isolated incident such as this. If the allegations are proven we would encourage prosecution of those responsible.

We believe that our scheme has the most robust inspection regime in the world. Pig farms are inspected 5 times a year including a visit every 3 months by a professional veterinarian. And we know that the scheme does have a positive effect in improving standards. Only on Friday of last week the Journal “Veterinary Record‟I reported a study commissioned by the governmentii that shows that farms in our scheme have significantly better compliance with the legal requirements than those that are not certified.

We are reviewing our systems in light of the lessons learned here and will almost certainly revert to more unannounced inspections.”