The Department of Veterinary Services said this evening it will officially respond to an urgent court order temporarily halting the sheep culling process within 48 hours.

Some 250 sheep had been on death row since 2012 when the Veterinary Service started culling the herd because it had not been registered. 220 sheep were killed before the case was referred to the courts.

An appeals court last month upheld a lower court decision for the cull to go ahead and this morning Veterinary Service officials moved in to continue it.

"They have started killing my sheep, they have started killing my sheep," Mr Attard, said in a phone call to Times of Malta.

But the cull was stopped when Mr Attard filed an urgent application before the court.

After a separate application by Mr Attard later in the morning, a judge ordered the Veterinary Service to return the sheep to their farm - in a converted quarry near Gharb.

They have started killing my sheep, they have started killing my sheep- Gianni Attard

Earlier, some 80 officials including Veterinary Service and animal welfare officers as well as policemen turned up at the farm and started removing the sheep. Mr Attard said he had been told by the director of Veterinary Service that they were being taken away to be culled.

The Department of Veterinary Services said this evening that if the court outcome would reflect the decisions of the courts of Malta, the department was ready to take immediate action to close this chapter.

It said that it took very seriously the traceability aspect in food production and remained committed not to compromise public health. IT was only in this way that infectious diseases such as TSC and brucellosis.

The controversy started when Mr Attard did not register the herd in 2012 and the Veterinary Service culled 216 at the time.

Mr Attard then fought a court battle to save the remaining 300.

In January he lost his case when an Appeals Court upheld a previous ruling delivered by a magistrate in July 2014, paving the way for the animals to be culled.

The magistrate had ruled that a previous culling in 2012, was justified on the grounds of safeguarding public health.

The decision by the veterinary authorities was lawful because failing to register the animals triggered an automatic suspicion that they were ill, the magistrate had ruled.

24-hour police surveillance  cost taxpayers more than €600,000.

The Appeals Court, presided over by Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri, Judge Giannino Caruana Demajo and Judge Noel Cuschieri, agreed that the lack of proper traceability of food-producing animals meant that the Director of Veterinary Services had reasonable cause for suspicion and therefore acted lawfully when he had ordered the culling. 

File photo

Mr Attard had argued that the culled sheep, which were estimated to cost in the region of €520,000, had been tested and none of them were found to be sick.
 
Mr Attard had insisted in court that he had been telling the authorities since July 2010 to register the sheep and tag them.

But the appeals court ruled that Mr Attard had shirked his responsibility to register the sheep and that he had done nothing to get them registered for two whole years.

It also threw out his complaint that he had not been given the opportunity to prove the sheep were not sick before the first batch was culled. The court said he should have done this before.

The judges said the law laid down that, for traceability purposes, all livestock, irrespective of age, had to be tagged before being transferred from one farm to another. Furthermore, a farmer had to keep a register of the number of sheep owned, updated with births and deaths.
Any unregistered animal was automatically presumed to be sick because its origins could not be traced. This constituted a public health hazard, the court ruled.

The court also noted that Mr Attard was not a registered farmer, his sheep were not registered and the premises on which the animals were held were not covered by the necessary permits.