Canadian herd officials stay on task protecting pigs

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/08/2021 (1542 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Travelling into the U.S. with a young Danish visitor a few years back took a little longer than we expected after border officials took her aside to investigate whether her intentions were truly just shopping in Grand Forks.

“They even asked me if I was a terrorist,” she said after she emerged. “When I came into Canada, all they asked is whether I’d been on a farm recently.”

We laughed about it then, but in reality, it’s no laughing matter.

Canada’s agricultural sector is highly dependent on people entering Canada answering that question truthfully, as well as other questions about any imported food products — even if it does involve inconvenient delays.

Inadvertently bringing a foreign animal disease into Canada on our shoes or stuff we’re packing could cost the livestock sector billions in losses and containment costs, lost export markets and the destruction of millions of animals.

The threat of foreign animal diseases getting into domestic herds and flocks is one that has farmers, industry organizations and governments in a constant state of alert.

Efforts kicked into high gear this summer with the discovery of African Swine Fever (ASF) on farms in several provinces of the Dominican Republic, which puts the disease in the Western Hemisphere for the first time in decades.

Canada doesn’t trade in pork products with the Dominican Republic but it is a popular holiday destination for many Canadians. As well, it shares the same island as Haiti, which raises the spectre of the disease becoming endemic throughout the Caribbean.

Even before the discovery in the Dominican Republic, ASF was a top-of-mind concern. While not a risk to human health, the disease is usually fatal to any pig it touches. Even if the animal survives, it is usually destroyed because it can still be a carrier.

Officials don’t know how it got into backyard hog herds in the Dominican Republic, which is part of the problem. This disease is quite adept at hitchhiking. In African countries, where it is endemic, it is spread by ticks.

Since 2007, it has been making its way through central Asia before it surfaced in China for the first time in 2018, with devastating results. Germany recently reported its first on-farm cases, although there have been previous reports of it circulating in the wild pig herds of Europe.

It can transfer from pig to pig or through contact with infected carcasses or body fluids. It can survive for several months in fresh and processed pork products. It can be transferred on contaminated farm equipment, vehicles, clothing, commercial livestock feed as well as food scraps fed to backyard flocks or consumed by wild pigs rummaging through waste dumps.

The wild boar population is the back door into the Canadian domestic herd industry officials fear the most, and the reason why they have been watching the growing populations on the Prairies with alarm. Imported three decades ago as a diversification strategy, wild boars either escaped or were turned loose by disillusioned producers.

They’ve proven remarkably adaptable to the harsh Prairie winters, so much so that it’s becoming questionable whether eradication is even an option. Unrestricted hunting has proven ineffective because all it does is disperse the herds and make them harder to track.

But while industry, federal and provincial governments officially began co-ordinating efforts to keep ASF out of Canada and to deal with it if it gets here through a Pan-Canadian action plan announced last November, no such collaboration is in place for managing the wild boar population.

The Manitoba Pork Council is calling on governments to pull together on this front as well, with co-ordinated programs and resources. “All western provinces have programming aimed at addressing the wild pig problem, but each jurisdiction is approaching the issue a little differently,” said Manitoba Pork Council general manager Cam Dahl in a recent opinion piece. “An effective wild pig eradication program should be co-ordinated across the region.”

Unfortunately, no one has yet figured out what that looks like.

In the meantime, their best defence is vigilance at the border and the farmgate.

Laura Rance is vice-president of Content for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com