Disease surveillance has been started on elk hunted from the Canadian Forces Base Suffield in southeastern Alberta.
Wildlife officials from Alberta Environment will be working with hunters to check animals following the discovery of tuberculosis in a cattle herd at Jenner, while Canadian Food Inspection Agency employees will test cattle from 30 farms under quarantine that may have come in contact with the original herd.
“We are following the lead of CFIA,” said senior wildlife biologist Joel Nicholson of Alberta Environment and Parks based in Medicine Hat.
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“Their focus is on the domestic animals, but we will be working with them into the future to determine what type of monitoring program we want to set with respect to the elk herd in the area.”
Hunters who have licenses to enter the military base to hunt elk must attend a daily briefing, which includes information about chronic wasting disease and bovine tuberculosis.
“If they have an animal that is exhibiting clinical signs, then they can contact us and one of our wildlife officers will go and look at the animal,” he said.
Suspicious cases will be sent for more testing.
“That becomes a passive surveillance program that we are able to do on short notice this year. We are able to examine the lymph nodes, and if there are abnormalities with anything that looks like TB, we will be sending those samples into the CFIA for testing,” Nicholson said.
“We didn’t have any evidence to suggest there was any concern for tuberculosis in any of our populations down here, so we haven’t had a surveillance program until finding out about this positive case this fall.”
Hunting is ongoing in November for three-day periods on the base. More hunting will be allowed in December and two more seasons in January.
“This is the third year of really aggressive hunting, and we have been successful in reducing the population in two consecutive years,” he said.
Alberta Environment’s most recent elk survey counted 4,600 head inside and outside of Suffield. There were 800 calves born this spring, so the current population is estimated at around 5,400 head in total.
About 220 elk originally came from Elk Island National Park and were disease free when they were released onto the base in the late 1990s to replace 1,200 feral horses.
The population has grown exponentially, and area ranchers have protested the elks’ presence because of concerns about destruction of fences, raiding feed supplies and disease spreading between wildlife and livestock.
Alberta Environment said the risk of disease transmission is very low.
Regardless of the outcome, wildlife should be continually tested for disease, said Bob Lowe, chair of Alberta Beef Producers.
“If it does turn out to be something more than just one odd cow, then if they actually want to clean it up, they have to test the elk,” said Lowe.
“They are going to have to start doing something about the elk. This is the last straw for those guys.”
Area farmers were not consulted about releasing the elk 20 years ago, said Jerry Schimpf, who has land at Buffalo on the edge of the military base.
Elk were not indigenous to the area, and they have thrived since they were relocated. Wildlife fences weren’t erected, so elk were able to roam freely.
The elk herd has upset the balance of nature, and the unintended consequence is out of control wildlife, he said.
“Now with such a herd of elk right across the fence from farmers who look after their land, not only because of love and necessity and economics, they stand by and have to watch the elk plow through their fences,” he said.
Disease surveillance may have come too late.
“They knew that elk are carriers of brucellosis and tuberculosis when left unchecked like that,” Schimpf said.
“They were promised they would manage the elk, and that herd would never go over 800. They totally forgot what they promised farmers,” Schimpf said.
