Silver said:
Of course there is no way it could possibly have come from the local wildlife population.
I'm not going to rule out that the Mexican Roping Cattle strain of TB is not in Canadian wildlife, but so far it hasn't been picked up.
We've had CFIA jump in on a few of these quarantine/investigation drama shows that involve this distinct strain of Bovine TB that has worked its way north from Mexico.
This outbreak appears to be real, another case in BC's Okanagan valley was real.
Two other BC investigations were misfires. One of these cases involved the famous bull from Vanderhoof that had a misterious change of colour from when he left his home ranch until he was slaughtered. He went from a white Charolais to a red bull. After the trace back testing of thousands of cattle, no other signs of TB were found.
The other misfire was the quarantine on my cow herd in 2008. Coincidently this quarantine no longer shows up in public records, probably due to someone's embarrassment.
In this case I sold a group of 18 month old heifers through a BC auction mart. They went to a BC feedlot for a period of time and then went into another feed yard in Washington State. From there the heifers went to a Washington State packing plant where one was detected to have Bovine TB along with another heifer from the feedlot that was not from my herd.
Thats when the fiasco started.
The trace back started and ended at my gate.
There was no investigation done in any of the premises other than the herd of origin of the 2 heifers. Zero consideration that the disease could have been picked up as the cattle made their way through the auction mart, trucking and feedlot system. The guy that raised the other one only had a handful of cattle so he was soon ruled out and CFIA bailed into me.
The quarantine went for almost a year with CFIA testing and re-testing cattle and killing a handful of cattle that reacted to the skin test. Further testing showed these slaughtered cattle to be false positives and the CFIA drew a blank.
When it was all done I got the privilege of selling two year old heifers and steers, yearling heifers and steers and cull cows all in one shot.
Towards the end of the investigation and quarantine I talked to the head Washington State vet who happened to be an old family acquaintance to ask his thoughts on what had gone on. He told me that one of the two heifers was in the advanced stage of TB, the other was in the initial stage. He then pulled up the file and told me mine was in the initial stage.
This was an expensive lesson in how the CFIA malfunctions and I hope they get it right this time.
My sympathy goes out to the ranchers in Alberta and Saskatchewan that are going through this now, it isn't a lot of fun.