Stewart Wass was 15 years old the day the cattle died.
The dairy herd his father Leonard owned near McLean, Sask., was the first suspected to be infected with foot-and-mouth disease in the epidemic of 1951-52.
In the end, thousands of cattle, sheep, chicken, pigs and a goat were destroyed.
“It was an ugly scene,” recalled Wass, who now lives in Indian Head.
“I still become emotional” talking about it.
Wass had just started a small herd of purebred Herefords, which were destroyed along with his father’s 38 head.
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“By the time the cattle were destroyed, he was pretty much emotionally exhausted … destroyed,” Wass said of his father.
“Our feeling is that it reduced his life considerably, in more than one way.”
Leonard Wass died when he was 69.
Overnight, he went from a steady income to nothing. He had a three-quarter section farm. Only 50 acres or so were used to grow wheat “as a sideline,” his son said.
He received compensation of about $100 per destroyed animal. It was based on the animal weight at the current market price, but in the aftermath of the epidemic, the price was low.
“There was no consideration of the investment made prior to that,” Wass said.
The money covered the cost of living and the land taxes, he added. The family bulldozed the trees on their land and started breaking it up for grain farming.
They were not allowed to raise cattle for two years after the farm was declared disease-free, although they eventually did raise some beef cattle. Nearly 50 years later, Wass looks at the situation through different eyes.
“As a kid, the gravity doesn’t hit you like if you were an adult.”
At times, the incident was exciting and intriguing. There were police officers, politicians and reporters coming to the farm every day.
Stewart attended high school in McLean, which was largely a dairy community. People were nervous, and questioned his coming and going from an infected farm each day.
“I became somewhat unpopular because I was present and making contact with these kids.”
He had to move into town and live with relatives in order to attend school.
Wass doesn’t buy the theory that foot-and-mouth came to Canada on the clothes of a German immigrant who worked for three or four days at their farm. Nor does he think it was in sausage the man brought with him.
He said he harbors a certain amount of bitterness because of how his parents suffered.
“My father was devastated,” he said.
