Cattle transporter fined €100,000 after goring kills truck driver at slaughterhouse
A cattle transporting company from Staphorst must pay a fine of €75,000 for an accident in which a bull killed one of their truck drivers in 2022. The Oost-Brabant court in Den Bosch ruled that the company failed to sufficiently protect its employee.
The accident happened on June 10, 2022, when the driver was delivering cattle to the Vion slaughterhouse in Tilburg. The 37-year-old truck driver unloaded 23 cows and then had to walk into the truck to unload the bull. The bull attacked, charging the man and goring him twice with its horns. The man died from his injuries.
The company argued that this was a fatal accident that they could not have foreseen. But according to the court, expert testimony showed that it is well known that bulls can be extremely dangerous. They weigh between 750 and 1,000 kilograms, are unstoppable once charging, and their behavior can change suddenly. “The dangers of working with (horned) bulls were therefore common knowledge within the livestock transport industry,” the court said.
“The transport company was responsible for the safety of its employees. The company did not adequately fulfill this duty of care,” the court said. The company failed to identify and inform employees of the risks involved in working with bulls, and “wrongly placed the responsibility for safe working practices entirely on its employees,” the court ruled.
The court fined the Staphorst cattle transporter €100,000, €25,000 of which is conditionally suspended. If the company commits another offense within two years, it will have to pay that €25,000, too. The sentence is equal to what the Public Prosecution Service (OM) recommended.
“The court recognizes that irreparable harm has been inflicted on the loved ones and that any form of punishment, in whatever form or magnitude, cannot undo this harm,” the court said. “Because the defendant is a company, the court is limited to imposing a fine.”
