Incentives rather than penalties may be needed to encourage producers to report sick and dying animals, says Canada’s chief veterinarian.
“We shouldn’t need significant legal and economic penalties to do the right thing,” Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency told the Canadian Meat Council’s annual meeting in Calgary Feb. 6.
“We should be doing it because we know that’s what builds confidence in the system and that’s what provides marketability.”
Consequences of a disease should not become disproportionate to the risk, he said, but if countries ignore diseases or deny their prevalence, it could cause some conditions to spread rapidly and without warning.
Read Also
VIDEO: How to check your feed mixer’s efficiency
Dwayne Summach, livestock and feed extension specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, showed visitors at Ag in Motion 2025 how to use the Penn State Particle Size Separator to check the efficiency and performance of your total mixed ration feed mixers.
“We cannot allow that to continue to happen because if we do, we are in effect increasing the threat.”
Evans is confident that export bans slapped on Canadian cattle last year after BSE was discovered in Alberta will be lifted this year because Canada has followed world health guidelines and proved it has a system capable of tracking and controlling disease.
“We will move live cattle to countries around the world this year. We will be opening additional markets that are currently closed this year. It will happen.”
Greater risk
However, open borders could be jeopardized if producers decide to bury sick animals without reporting them. That would increase the risk of finding a sick Canadian-born animal in another country.
“If that happens we are looking at five to seven years of pure hell to get back into the international marketplace,” he said. “Because that tells other countries the integrity of our inspection systems is not working.”
There is a chance more surveillance could reveal more BSE-infected animals, he added. The key is reporting every case and working to fix the problem.
Canada has promised to step up annual testing to 30,000 samples within the next two years. Following last year’s BSE discovery, Canada tested 2,700 animals because traceback to the originating farm was not perfect and records were missing.
In the Washington state case last December, the CFIA found the origin of the infected cow within 12 hours after receiving the ear tag from the United States.
Such incidences proved Canada must improve and upgrade national livestock identification programs, Evans said. The next step is tracking all movement because it is not good enough to know where animals were born and died, he added.
“We know what we have in place today is not going to sustain us into the future in terms of tracking animals in real time.”
