Department of Agriculture officials investigating a case of BSE became suspicious when they discovered that a de-horned cow was registered as having horns a year earlier, a trial at Cork Circuit Criminal Court heard yesterday.
Opening the State's case, Mr John Edwards SC, prosecuting, said Mr James Sutton (58) called a vet to his farm at Kilgarriffe House, Kilgarriffe, Clonakilty, in September 1996 to examine a sick cow.
The vet suspected the cow was suffering from BSE and called in Department of Agriculture officials, who had the entire herd slaughtered but then became suspicious about the origins of the diseased animal, Mr Edwards said.
Department officials noted that the animal had no horns, while identification papers for the animal stated that it had a full set of horns when examined a year before. There was no evidence of it having being de-horned in the interim.
They became even more suspicious on further examination of the diseased animal when they found a fresh piece of animal flesh in the barrel of the identification tag on the ear of the cow, said Mr Edwards.
A small piece of flesh would normally be punched out by the insertion of the tag, but cows had to be tagged after birth so that if there was any flesh visible in the tag barrel of the five-year-old animal, it should have been highly degraded, he said.
Mr Edwards was addressing the jury trying Mr Sutton, who has denied a series of charges including purchasing and placing a BSE-infected animal in a herd in an unlawful attempt to obtain herd depopulation compensation of £75,000.
He alleged that Mr Sutton deliberately bought a BSE-infected animal from an outside source and put it into his herd to orchestrate a situation where his herd would have to be slaughtered, so that he would qualify for the premium rate of compensation.
Mr Sutton is charged with conspiring with two other west Cork men and others to defraud the Department of Agriculture. Following legal argument Judge A. G. Murphy ordered that all three should be tried separately.
After yesterday's opening address by Mr Edwards, the trial went into legal argument and Judge Murphy sent the jury home, advising members that the legal argument could take a number of days and that they would be contacted again when required.