The 52-year-old man was employed on the farm in 2017 and is trained in animal transport. In the summer of last year he was given the task of transporting pigs that have become overpowered, that is, larger than pigs tend to be at slaughter. Pigs can put on 700 - 800 grams a day and during the summer of 2018, the pigs sometimes became over 14 days on the farm.
When the man came to the yard to transport the 100 pigs who were waiting, he discovered that the pigs were too big, something he did not know before, he says.
It should have taken over an hour and a half to load the pigs and during the trial, the man tells him he started to get a little panicked because it was a hot day and the truck was in the middle of the sun. He goes on to say that the fans were running but because it was a hot day they didn't help much. When the man then unloaded the pigs, he saw, as he recalls, that one pig was dead and two had to be killed. But the investigation later revealed that two of the pigs died during transport and one had to be killed to exclude swine fever.
The man is sentenced to conditional sentence with daily fines. Had the 100 pigs been loaded under normal conditions the loading would have been approved. But the conditions were not normal, the pigs were overpowered, it was just too hot that day and the pigs also stayed an hour in the heat because the man was an hour too early when can arrive at the slaughterhouse.