Most fallen stock is collected on a routine basis and nobody outside the holding needs to know about it. Occasionally a death raises a suspicion that changes the sequence entirely, and knowing what to do in the first thirty minutes is worth a great deal. Martlands operates as a licensed and DEFRA approved provider of fallen stock and ABP collection across the North West, and notifiable disease fallen stock collection is the one area where the usual advice to book a removal straight away is not the right first step. The reporting obligation comes first, and everything else follows from what you are told.
The Reporting Duty Comes Before the Collection
Where a keeper suspects a notifiable disease in livestock, the law requires that suspicion to be reported to the Animal and Plant Health Agency without delay. This is a legal duty placed on the keeper, and it is not discharged by telling a vet, a neighbour or a collection company. It is also not conditional on being confident. Suspicion is the trigger, and a keeper who reports something that turns out to be nothing has done exactly the right thing.
Once a report is made, APHA decides what happens next. That may include restrictions on movements onto and off the holding, instructions about how the carcass is to be held, and in some circumstances a requirement that the animal is not moved or disposed of at all until it has been examined. Those instructions override the ordinary twenty-four hour collection duty, and a keeper following them is not in breach of the Animal By-Products (Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2013. What matters is that you can show you were following an instruction rather than simply delaying.
What Should Make You Pause
The circumstances worth treating carefully are patterns rather than individual signs. Several animals dying in a short period without an obvious cause, sudden deaths in previously healthy adult stock, neurological signs, unusual lesions noticed at handling, and rapid mortality across a poultry flock all warrant a veterinary opinion before anything is moved. Wild bird die-offs on or near the holding are a separate signal worth acting on in their own right.
None of this means routine losses should be treated as suspicious. The great majority of fallen stock is exactly what it appears to be. But the cost of pausing for a veterinary opinion is a few hours, and the cost of moving material off a holding that turns out to be affected is entirely different in scale. Our overview of understanding zoonotic diseases covers why some of these risks matter to the people handling the animal as well as to the herd or flock.
Holding a Carcass Under Restriction
If you are told to hold an animal pending examination, do it properly. Keep the carcass covered and secure, away from other livestock, away from watercourses and drainage, and away from any point where dogs, birds or vermin can reach it. Keep people away too, and keep a note of who has been near it. Where the holding is under movement restriction, that generally applies to the collection vehicle as well, which is why our farm and fallen stock collection team need to be told at the point of booking rather than discovering it when a driver arrives at a closed gate.
Keep a written record of every instruction you receive, who gave it and when. If the eventual position is that no notifiable disease was involved and normal disposal can proceed, that record is what explains the gap between the date of death and the date of collection on your paperwork.
Who APHA Is and What They Do
Keepers who have never had cause to contact APHA are often unclear about its role, and confusion in the middle of an incident is unhelpful. We have set out plainly who is APHA and, separately, what APHA is responsible for, including where its remit sits alongside the local authority and the veterinary profession. Reading these when nothing is happening is a good deal more useful than trying to work it out during an outbreak.
Once Disposal Is Authorised
When you are cleared to proceed, the material is handled through the ordinary Category 1 route unless you are told otherwise. Our Category 1 ABP collection operates under Animal By-Products Licence No APB/CCN21/373/8002, Waste Carrier Licence CB/QE5406MT and Site Licence EAWML/100236, and every collection produces a Commercial Document. Where the material has been the subject of an APHA process, that document becomes an important part of showing the chain was completed correctly.
Fallen cattle over forty-eight months of age still require BSE testing, and as a DEFRA approved processing and sampling facility we carry that out within our own licensed operation. Where a holding has been dealing with a suspected disease incident, keeping the sampling within a single operator reduces the number of parties in the chain, which is generally what everybody involved wants.
Coverage and Response
Disease incidents are not confined to the areas closest to a depot, and neither is our service. We collect across Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside, Cumbria, Greater Manchester and North Wales, and we operate national fallen stock collection beyond that where it is needed. As a member of the National Fallen Stock Company we can also work through NFSCO scheme arrangements where a holding is signed up.
Practically, what we ask during an incident is honesty about the situation. Tell us what has been reported, what you have been told to do, and whether the holding is under any restriction. That lets us plan the collection properly instead of discovering the position at your gate, and it protects both your holding and every other holding on the round that day.
Getting Advice
To arrange a collection once you are clear to proceed, or to talk through how collections would work if your holding came under restriction, call 01704 776977. We are not a substitute for veterinary advice or for APHA, and we will say so plainly, but we can tell you exactly how the collection side would operate. You can also reach the office through contact us, and we can set up an arrangement in advance for holdings that want one in place.
