A reader, Alf, has challenged my comment that regulations prohibit me from slaughtering our livestock and then feeding the meat to my family.
He questioned “exactly which act of parliament says that only you can consume the meat” as he could not find a law to that effect.
Actually, there are three pieces of law that cover this: EC Regulation 999/2001 (as amended), TSE (Scotland) Regulations 2006 and the Food Hygiene (Scotland) Regulations 2006. (England and Wales have similar regulations.)
The Food Standards Agency has put together a guidance paper on the regulations, Private Slaughter of Livestock Guidance for Food Authorities in Scotland on Enforcement Controls under the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE) Regulations, which sums up the legal position.
The guidance clearly states: “It is, therefore, not lawful for the farmer to sell or supply privately killed meat to the rest of his household without the TSE Regulations having been applied, as such family members are considered to be a third party.
“The only exception is a truly private kill where a farmer slaughters the animal himself,
processes it himself, and consumes it himself.”
Note that while the TSE Regulations only apply to those TSE susceptible species under SRM controls—bovine, ovine and caprine species—the guidelines say EC Regulation 999/2001 does apply to any slaughter of an animal that will be placed on the market for human consumption and, according to the guidance, that requires the slaughter to take place in an approved slaughterhouse.
The guidance makes it very clear that “the market” is definied as applying not only when a sale of meat for human consumption takes place, but also where there is any other form of supply to a third party in the community—with family members explicitly described as third parties.
Even if you manage to meet the TSE requirements, the law still makes it illegal to supply the rest of your household with meat from the animal thanks to the EC Regulation.
Technically, even having a mobile slaughterman come your farm or croft to kill the animal for human consumption is illegal as the slaughter should take place in an approved slaughterhouse.
The only exceptions are for producers of small amounts of poultry or rabbits who may slaughter them on farm and sell or transfer them direct to the final consumer or to establishments supplying the final consumer for human consumption.
However, the poultry and rabbits must be labelled or marked with the name and address of the farm where it was slaughtered, while detailed records have to be kept of what was slaughtered and who it was supplied to.
The legal position, therefore, is that I can slaughter small numbers of chickens and rabbits on the croft and give the meat to the rest of my household to consume, provided I complete the appropriate paperwork.
But I cannot slaughter pigs, lambs or any other livestock on the croft, and supply their meat to my family. I have to eat it all myself.
If they want to eat the meat legally and if I want to supply it legally, then the animals must be slaughtered in an approved slaughterhouse and pass through all the inspections and processes.
Of course, it is entirely possible to bypass the law if you have unregistered animals because only the people with registered animals get found out when there’s a discrepancy in their books.
If, like some people I’ve come across, I put a litter of piglets down as 10 instead of the 11 there actually were, I could then covertly fatten the eleventh before killing and eating with my family with no one being the wiser.
Similarly with lambs, enter triplets as twins in your flock book and kill the third one on the quiet.
We don’t do that as we have a pedigree herd of pigs and accurate farrowing figures are essential for establishing the value of a sow or boar.
And we can’t do it for lambs as they come from a properly registered flock.
Plus, of course, we’re upright citizens with a deep respect for the UK’s laws…
As you say, the regulations, taken as a whole, are asinine…there would appear to be a complete lack of joined up thinking here…unless that is, the government’s real intention is to drive out crofters, smallholders and smallscale farmers…
Have you raised this as an issue with your SMP perhaps?
Ahh, sounds like the US Military, “Don’t ask, don’t tell”, policy dealing with being gay. And I am sure both come down to BS.
And sorry abotu before thinking of Orville as a pet instead of a farm animal. Totally wrong mindset on my account.
Raise it with my MSP? You must be joking. It’s the one and only Alex Salmond, whose office is like a black hole for communications.
We used to have a Lib-Dem MSP who, if you contacted her on a Sunday with a genuine emergency, would be on the phone to you personally within two or three hours. She replied to all our communications herself, including by email, and actually got action taken on several issues.
While not Lib-Dem supporters, we voted for her at the last election as she was a genuine constituency MSP. Unfortunately, a lot of other people thought the area would have a higher profile and do better with the leader of SNP based here. Ho-hum.
As for the regulatory burden, I know about these regulations thanks to Trading Standards and Animal Welfare Officers, who mentioned them in passing while talking about other regulations.
But there are hundreds of people who keep livestock on a small scale who either don’t know of the regulations or don’t realise their full extent. You only have to visit the smallholding and crofting forums to see the full extent of the lack of knowledge.
And these are just three of the regulations that apply to us. I know another 20-30 fairly well and know of another score or so in passing, but I’m very sure there are hundreds that apply. I’m also fairly sure that we’re almost certainly in breach of some, if not many, of those regulations.
The law says ignorance is no excuse, but frankly no one but a specialist lawyer has a chance in hell of knowing all the regulations that apply. And as for meeting them, what do you do when regulations are mutually contradictory? Or totally absurd?
To give some idea of the burden, I recently found a 2005 listing of all the food regulations in the UK. There are scores and scores of them. Unfortunately, no one has done a similar list covering farming — as we come under food, environment, agriculture, animal welfare, health and safety, etc etc.
The bureaucrats have to do something to justify their pay don’t they and my bet is that none of them ever go near a farm as they might get their designer shoes muddy (or worse).
Laws seem to be written for big businesses, those who can lobby and then offer jobs on the board to retired MP’s. As a small farmer you have nothing to offer.
Well that’s the cynical side of me. On the positive side there is a need to protect the population in general, think BSE, but it was big business’s practices that lead to that one wasn’t it?
I’m puzzled about why you can’t take the lambs to Inverurie. I’m sure there’s a reason - you wouldn’t make work for yourself - but I’m curious as to what it is. Another Regulation?
Scotch Premier don’t do sheep in Inverurie, only pigs and cattle. Their sheep slaughtering operation is in Dornoch.
Mathers do sheep and cattle, but prefer to deal with the trade, didn’t want to do “just two lambs” last time I called and only wanted farm assured sheep.
Deborah, it’s funny how often we’re told we have to accept curbs on our freedoms in order to protect those freedoms.
When Gordon Brown was challenged today about Britain’s surveillance society, including the fingerprinting of children by schools and the retention of more than a million innocent people on the DNA database, he replied: “We are taking the steps to protect the liberties of citizens.”
It’s the same with food laws. By all means ban home-slaughtered meat and home-produced food products from going into the wider food chain unless they meet certain standards, by why ban families from slaughtering and eating their own produce, or offering it to guests provided the guests know it’s home produced?
The real aim of much of this is control by the ever-extending octopus of bureaucracy. “They” know what is best for “us” and “they” will protect us, including from ourselves.
Bah!
There is a word that i use very often when rules ‘n’ regulations and elf ‘n’ safety are mentioned and that word is………
(can’t spell it out, children may be reading, but it starts with b, ends with s and has 2 o’s 2 l’s and a c and a k)
Well, it was more of a query than a challenge, as I’m not that familiar with the statutes and a cursory internet search didn’t bring up much besides The Welfare of Animals (Slaughter or Killing) Regulations 1995 which do mention the ‘private consumption’ clause. Curiously, there is also an ‘other than for commercial purpose’ exemption, which appears to allow both consumption by family and indeed giving away meat. But, as you point out, it is not the only statute that applies, hence my query since I know you don’t make statements without good reason and I was sure you’d have details of the other statutes which I had not found.
Interestingly, the statute I did find specifically prohibits anyone from entering “premises used wholly or mainly as a dwelling, where he reasonably suspects that any activity which is governed by these Regulations is, or has been, carried on, for the purpose of ascertaining whether there is or has been any contravention of these Regulations” (Clause 23). I’m sure you can see the implications of this.
I’ll see if I can fathom those other statutes, now…
All the best,
alf
Well, I’ve briefly scanned through the references you provided. I’m no lawyer, but as far as I can see, Regulation (EC) 852/2004 ‘on the hygiene of foodstuffs’ specifically does not apply to domestic consumption and therefore The Food Hygiene (Scotland) Regulations 2006 do not apply to food produced for domestic consumption. That implies that members of your family can eat food you produce, and people not of your family can eat it if you serve it to them in your own home (my commonsense interpretation of ‘domestic’). Indeed, if that were not the case we’d all be breaching the law every day of our lives. Well, maybe not those who live on pot noodles and mars bars, but the rest of us, certainly.
Next, the TSE (Scotland) Regulations 2006 limit their application to that of the EC Regulation 999/2001, thus we only need consider whether the later applies (since if it does then they both do). Now, the application of this is spelt out very clearly (much more clearly than the other Regulations, in fact). It says that it “shall apply to the production and placing on the market of live animals and products of animal origin”, then lists a number of exceptions. But it is silent as to whether it applies to the production of animals not destined for ‘placing on the market’. It even allows for rearing of animals in each category on the same premises, providing they remain separated. Now, whether it was intended to apply to animals reared at home for home consumption is not clear: I suspect a visit to some of the newest EC members (Poland, anyone?) who have an extant culture of home rearing would help clarify the issue.
The general thread I get from reading all of the bits of law I have seen so far is that the law makers only intended these laws to apply to commercial operations - they did not intend to constrain the production of meat for home consumption providing no money changes hands.
So, much of this seems to boil down to whether you sell animals intended for human consumption. Since you do in the form of live animals I’m inclined to agree with you that much of the red tape does apply, but, in my view, these laws appear not to apply if you separate out the animals you intend to slaughter and eat at home, and even that restriction is only to avoid the TSE law. I accept that this is easy for me to assert, perhaps harder to defend!
It’s worth noting that the various government agencies set up to police these laws are the very worst place to go for guidance - they naturally prefer to limit their monitoring to large commercial operations so will advise anyone from doing anything that they might have to monitor. Hence the general confusion and contradictions you encounter and recount here from time to time after you’ve had cause to deal with them. But their guidance is not the law.
I’m genuinely interested to discover if the Executive really do intend to outlaw the home rearing and consumption of animals, or whether that is just an unintended effect of the overzealous application of laws on the part of government agencies.
All the best,
alf
Eileen…there’s another handy little word for it…it’s brown, and comes steaming out of Cows (or rather the male equivalent), but ISN’T the Isle of Wight ferry…
In Ireland there is allowance for slaughter of the occasional pig at home. Beyond that nobody seems to know whats what. There is similar confusion for other livestock … goats must only be killed in registered abattoirs, but there are only 6 of those in Ireland. Where do all the billies go?