£3,000 court bill for slaughterhouse that shot animal with bolt cartridges that weren't strong enough
A Shropshire slaughterhouse has been fined £2,000 after it admitted failing to look after the welfare of an animal as it was being killed.
AH Griffiths Ltd, of High Street, Leintwardine, near Craven Arms, had been convicted in November of two separate breaches of the Welfare of Animals at the Time of Killing (England) Regulations. It faces a total court bill of more than £3,000.
One of the offences was that the company allowed a worker to shoot an animal with a bolt gun to the head twice with cartridges which weren't strong enough to effectively stun the male bovine.
On Thursday Cannock Magistrates' Court handed down their sentence.
The court heard that on February 23, 2022, the company permitted a named person to shoot a male bovine animal in the head with a captive bolt gun twice using cartridges that were not of sufficient strength to effectively stun the animal.
The company also admitted a second charge that it failed to ensure that a equipment was used in such a way as to facilitate rapid and effective stunning or killing.
The company also admitted that the appropriate strength of cartridge for the size of animal was not used and the back-up captive bolt gun was not used following the initial shot which failed to stun the animal.
AH Griffiths was fined £2,000 for the first charge, and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £914 and a victim surcharge of £190. There was no separate penalty imposed for the second or the third charge.
Magistrates took the defendant's guilty plea into account when imposing sentence.
The company was left with a total court bill of £3,104.
