NISKU, Alta. – Four Saskatchewan elk farms are in limbo after being declared “highly contagious” by government officials because of a high level of chronic wasting disease, or CWD, found in their livestock.
Not only can the farmers not raise livestock of any kind any longer, they must maintain their perimeter fences to prevent wild animals from wandering onto their property. They also can’t grow grain or hay on their farms.
“Everybody’s at their wits end. They want to know what they can do,” said Rick Alsager of Maidstone, Sask., whose neighbour owns one of the four farms designated highly contaminated by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
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“These guys are on the phone every week wanting to know what’s going on. These guys are desperate,” said Alsager, who is part of a class action lawsuit suing Agriculture Canada for allowing diseased animals into the country. Alsager’s 700 elk were slaughtered and three tested positive.
George Luterbach, chief veterinarian for the CFIA, said the four farms are believed to have had a lot of disease over an extended period of time. This possibly allowed the virtually indestructible prion that causes chronic wasting disease to get into the soil and contaminate land.
“The four farms have had a lot of disease over time,” said Luterbach of Winnipeg.
The other 38 farms where CWD has been found in Saskatchewan and Alberta are not believed to be contaminated with the disease because CWD was found quickly.
Chronic wasting disease was found in the four banned farms in 2000 and 2001. Since CWD was first discovered in the late 1990s in Canada, 8,300 cervids have been destroyed and 231 have tested positive.
During a CWD conference Jan. 11, Beth Williams of the University of Wyoming said while they still don’t know how CWD is transmitted between animals, they believe the environment plays a role.
“We do have multiple observations of transmission of CWD to susceptible animals by association of a contaminated environment,” said Williams, a leading expert on chronic wasting disease.
Mike Miller, a manager with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, also said they believe “the agent persists in the environment.”
Luterbach acknowledged that the agency’s decision to not allow agriculture activity on the farms has caused financial grief for the elk producers.
“They’re caught in a bit of a dilemma,” said Luterbach, who said the agency has been searching for more than a year to find some form of compensation for the four farms. CFIA has paid more than $31 million to producers in compensation for elk killed because of the disease. It has always maintained the cleanup of the property is the responsibility of the owner.
It has tried to get money from disaster programs, income programs like the Net Income Stabilization Account program and even research funds, but have found no money for the farmers, he said.
“It’s not from a lack of trying to be reasonable on our part.”
There are only two ways these four farms can be taken off the highly contaminated list, he said.
The farms can be used as a research project where the farms are restocked with 50 breeding elk for four years. After four years the animals are slaughtered and tested for CWD. If the animals are free of the disease, the farm can be removed from the list.
But the agency doesn’t have any money to pay for such a project.
The other way is for worldwide research to prove that cleaning and disinfecting the property eliminates the risk of the disease.
But Alsager said there has to be a way to allow the producers to get back into business or for the government to buy the farms.
“They must compensate people for sitting in limbo,” said Alsager, who believes there isn’t concrete proof the disease is transmitted through the environment.
“This is not a highly contagious disease. There is no evidence it is spread through the environment. They don’t have the science to show the prion lives in the environment,” he said.
“If you don’t have concrete proof, you must pay the guys compensation.”
