Animal By-Products: Disposal

Comments from the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation on the EU Review of the Animal By Products Regulation, 27 November 2006

The National Gamekeepers' Organisation makes the following important comments to Defra concerning the European Commission's review of the 2002 Animal By-Products Regulation (EC 1774/2002) and on its proposed replacement by a new regulation currently in draft, SANCO/10452/2006 Rev.5 (26.09.06).
For the record, the NGO was founded in 1997 and now has over 10,500 members. It represents the gamekeeping profession in England and Wales. More details about the organisation can be found on our website: http://www.nationalgamekeepers.org.uk/
Gamekeepers have an interest in the legal framework for handling animal by-products because their work results in animal waste of the following kinds:

(a) Waste eggs, chicks and culled gamebirds arising from the rearing of gamebirds in captivity.
(b) Diseased wild animals such as sick deer culled for welfare reasons.
(c) Dead wild animals (eg: rats, rabbits, crows and foxes) resulting from predator and pest control activities.
(d) Carcasses of dead wild game species (eg pheasants, partridge, rabbits, deer) arising from culling and shooting sports. Typically these are the healthy but physically damaged animals that cannot enter the food chain.
(e) Game waste arising from processing game carcasses (eg offal, heads and legs of deer, feathers from plucking, waste meat, wings, feet etc).
The NGO understands that 3(a) constitutes farm waste and must therefore, under existing laws, be dealt with by approved rendering or incineration.
We also understand that current laws require that waste arising from the culling of diseased wild animals (3(b)) must be similarly handled.
We further recognise that 3(e) is considered to be food production waste, and must therefore also be disposed of by approved methods, not burial or burning.
Items in categories 3 (c) and 3 (d), however, have up until now always been completely exempt from the Animal By- Products Regulation because the regulations have never applied to healthy wild animals and parts thereof. This exemption has been crucial to gamekeeping and countryside management in the UK and if the proposal to weaken it (Article (1) (2) (c)) goes through, there could be real problems for our profession and the well-being of the British countryside.
If all those types of wild animal by-products specified in Article (1) (2) (c) sub-clauses (i) to (iii) are included in the regulations in the future, thousands of tons of reject game carcasses could have to be incinerated or rendered in approved plants. Not only will this have an economic impact on those who have to pay for this expensive disposal, it will also have an environmental cost in terms of diesel for collection, fuel for burning, gas emissions and therefore global warming.

Currently, under the general wild animal exemption, these items are buried in deep, lockable chambers, as has been best practice for many years. These chambers are present on most farms and country estates and are sited well away from dwellings, public access or watercourses. They have been used for the disposal of dead wild animals for many decades with no known risk to health.
The inclusion under sub-clause (iii) of waste from game sold other than locally will catch most shoots because they sell their dead gamebirds and deer carcasses to game dealers who in turn retail further afield. Our interpretation of the proposed Regulation is that all waste arising as a by-product of shooting activity on such estates would have to be rendered or incinerated.

The Environment Agency seem to believe, however, that such waste could legally be abandoned if it arose at the point of kill and not as a result of later preparation and processing. If correct, this would encourage people to start grading and cutting up game where it is killed, rather than back at the game larder. That would be wholly counter to good practice in meat hygiene, which the FSA agrees is best served by taking carcasses as quickly as possible back to the clean environment of the game larder with the minimum amount of cutting and preparation in the field (in the case of deer, for example, just the immediate removal of the green offal).
If gamekeepers and estates have to start paying for the large volumes of waste arising from (8) and (9) to be incinerated or rendered, the result will be economic hardship within a very marginal business activity and a consequent drop in the marketing of high quality game meat, to which Ministers are publicly committed. Overall, it would lead to further economic hardship for rural areas.
To give an example: the carcass of a muntjac deer will sell to a game dealer for about £10. One gamekeeper was last summer quoted £40 by a contractor for the speedy collection of the waste head and legs of a dead muntjac. Were safe burial of such waste no longer allowed, in the warmer summer months daily collection would be essential. Why should anyone accept a loss of £30 on each deer shot? Most won't - they will simply stop culling deer. Yet Ministers have just committed the Government to increasing the deer cull in the interests of environmental conservation and road safety.
To give just one more illustration: a typical day's pheasant shooting may result in a bag of 100 birds, for which the game dealer may pay £50. When he collects, he is likely to reject 5% of the carcasses because they are damaged in some way (by being heavily shot, or falling into mud, for example). Can an estate really be expected to phone a contractor to ask for 5 rejected pheasants to be collected for rendering or incineration at a cost of perhaps £40? It just won't happen.
We believe that an extension of the Animal By-Products Regulation to the above categories of wild animals will lead to widespread and illegal dumping of the waste because unscrupulous individuals simply won't pay for incineration etc but equally won't risk putting waste (safely) in an existing burial chamber as now, because it might be found with resultant legal action. Instead they will leave it randomly around the countryside where it would pose a far greater risk to human and animal health. Much better to dispose of it, as now, in a well-designed and constructed burial chamber.
We also believe that if the proposed new Animal By-Products Regulation becomes law there could be further problems arising from the fact that:

(a) gamekeepers might (under Article (1) (2) (c) (ii) no longer be able to use dead rabbits etc to feed captive crows and magpies that are used as decoys in essential predator control programmes. Nor might gamekeepers and others feed dead wildlife to ferrets and other carnivorous pets. (There could be ways round this under some of the later Articles and derogations but the certainty of this is far from clear).
(b) gamekeepers might no longer be able to bait middens with dead wildlife to attract foxes to areas where they can more easily be caught.
(c) it could (if the Environment Agency's interpretation is wrong) become an offence to leave a deer gralloch on the open hill in cases where the rest of the carcass was being sold other than ‘locally'. (Deer must be eviscerated immediately they are shot and in remote moorland areas the gralloch is an important source of protein for eagles and other species).
We find all the above serious consequences of this proposed legislation entirely at odds with the sentiments expressed by the European Commission themselves in paragraph 22 of the preamble to the draft Regulation (page 7), which states:

"Also, it is necessary to tailor the requirements to the risk [our emphasis], introducing sufficient flexibility to be applicable in all situations, including small businesses. In particular it is necessary to recognize that, for certain businesses, it is not possible to apply the full requirements relating to the collection, transport and discarding and that, in some cases, local arrangements can suffice to ensure compliance with the Regulation, avoiding undue burdens."

We suggest that Defra could use this in rejecting the current draft and pursuing a continuation of the current exemption for all wild animals. The ‘objectives' referred to in the quote are presumably those expressed in Article 1, which refers to preventing risk to animal or public health. The conventional burial chambers used by gamekeepers carry no such risk. Where is the evidence that they do?
We note that the potential for derogations under Article 24 (1) (b) does appear to allow for the possibility of burial of diseased wild animals and some of the other forms of waste referred to above, "Under the supervision of the competent authority...where collection transport and discarding would result in disproportionate arrangements." Could this be applied to help gamekeepers and others if it proves impossible to remove the extension of the Regulation to wild animals altogether?
We can at least welcome, although perhaps only with an ironic cheer, the European Commission's new intention (preamble 8 on page 5 of the draft Regulation) to exclude wild animals that have died naturally in the countryside. That change is, we believe, largely the result of our own organization pointing out to Defra that an earlier draft of the Commission's proposal required all ‘registered' premises to dispose of any dead wild animals by rendering or incineration. This could have applied to most farms and thus to all the wildlife dying naturally upon them. We extend our thanks to Defra for managing to get the Commission to drop that particular requirement!
We also welcome the intention to exclude wild animals destined for hunting trophies or the taxidermist (Article 9(f)).
Article (4) (1) (c) (i) and (ii), and (d) defines category 1 waste as including anything to which certain prohibited substances have been ‘administered'. We would ask Defra to check, please, that this would not catch game meat which, as a result of shooting, contains lead shot or other bullet residues.
Finally, we share Defra's concern that the proposed Regulation would allow the Commission to change the law in future more or less on a whim and without proper scrutiny by the European Parliament (Article 34(2)).