Obituary: Colleagues pay tribute to Aviagen vet Daniel Pearson

Tributes have been paid to Daniel Pearson, Aviagen’s European Veterinary Health Director, after his sudden and premature death on 6 July.
He died on a cycling holiday with his wife Christina on the Isle of Arran.
Born in 1957 in Ingham, North Queensland, Australia, Pearson studied Veterinary Medicine at The University of Queensland. In 1982 Dan “saw practice” at D B Marshalls, in Scotland. This was one of the largest integrated poultry companies in the UK in the 1980s.
Two years after graduation in Queensland, he returned to Scotland and joined Marshalls as a field veterinarian where he met and married Christina and had two children.
When Marshalls was bought by Grampian Country Foods he became the principal veterinarian for all their poultry subsidiaries throughout the UK. Pearson then took his expertise as one of the most knowledgeable and experienced poultry vets in Europe into the primary breeding sector by joining Aviagen.
He was an active member of the British Veterinary Poultry Association and President from 1995-97. He was also an invited delegate of the GB group within the Poultry Veterinary Study Group of the EU (PVSG). He was elected last year as Junior Vice President of the international forum on Avian Health, aiming to take the lead as President next year.
Colleagues said he was a truly gentle man, easy to relate to and to work with productively. He was always involved in his local community and church.
He enjoyed cycling and participated in club riding at weekends. He also completed some long and arduous cycle rides usually with colleagues and friends raising money for various charities. Colleagues said he would be sorely missed by an industry he felt passionately about, a community he was an integral and valued part of, and most of all by the family he loved.