For more than a decade, Rodney Checkowski has believed that his cattle get sick after they are tested for tuberculosis.
Despite that, a Manitoba judge ruled April 16 that Checkowski doesn’t have the right to refuse tuberculosis testing on his farm north of Rossburn.
Judge John Combs found Checkowski guilty of refusing to present his cattle for testing and fined the cattle producer $1,500 for the offence.
On June 6, 2008, employees of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency wanted to test Checkowski’s cattle for TB. But the producer kept his cattle in the pasture away from the farm that day, so CFIA workers were unable to conduct the tests.
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Of the 650 cattle producers in the CFIA’s TB eradication zone around Riding Mountain National Park, three have refused to have their animals tested, said Robert Keffen, a CFIA veterinarian in Brandon.
Checkowski, who didn’t have a lawyer, said in court that since 1983, animal health officials have quarantined cattle on his farm four times and destroyed 27 because they were infected with TB.
In addition to those losses, Checkowski said he was forced shoot several animals over the years because they went off feed and became lame after CFIA employees tested his herd for TB.
Checkowski said in court that he believed the tuberculin test was causing his cattle to contract TB or become ill.
However, a crown witness said that is scientifically impossible.
“I’m not aware of any situation where the tuberculin injected has caused TB,” said CFIA veterinarian Maria Koller-Jones, who heads the agency’s bovine TB eradication program.
Tuberculin is made from a dead Myobacterium bovis bacterium, the organism that causes TB, Koller-Jones told the court. The organism is heated to a high temperature, similar to pasteurization, thereby killing the bacteria before the tuberculin protein is extracted.
“(It’s) biologically impossible for that protein to cause TB,” she said.
But in the spring of 2008, Checkowski was convinced of the link between the TB tests and the poor health of his herd so he asked the CFIA to test 12 of his cattle using a test where tuberculin is injected into the animal’s neck.
After those tests in March 2008, one bull reacted to the test and it was removed from the farm.
A couple of days after the test Checkowski said he noticed five animals got sick.
Checkowski concluded they were TB positive.
Koller-Jones refuted Checkowski’s argument in court, stating it’s improbable that experienced CFIA staff would miss several positive reactions to the test.
The CFIA then wanted to test the rest of Checkowski’s herd on June 6.
The cattle producer said he never actually refused testing and would have allowed it if the CFIA first removed the five cattle he believed were reactors and if they used the neck skin test along with a blood test.
In his ruling, Combs said Checkowski was guilty because he lacked authority to tell the CFIA which animals were positive and how the agency should conduct its business.
Meanwhile, in a separate case, Nick Synchyshyn who farms 14 kilometres south of Riding Mountain National Park, was fined $3,000 for refusing TB test on his cattle.
Combs ruled that Synchyshyn, failed to make his herd of about 50 cattle available for testing when CFIA employees visited his farm Dec. 30, 2008.
