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Maple Grief

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MAPLE GRIEF  - By Mark Purdey.

How the BSE Businessmen are driving the Canadian cattle ranching community to extinction.

Cattle Battle.

The new year came in with a flurry of light snowfall that lay scattered across our hillside farm, blanketing out the muddy ruts of 2004 with an almost surreal white brilliance. But the purity of that new morning was somehow tainted by a series of desperately sad emails from Canadian family ranchers. The news of two fresh cases of mad cow disease in Alberta, had clearly shock waved the rural communities into a state of virtual suicidal despair. Following on from a year of US border closure that had virtually barricaded up the country’s cattle sales , combined with the knock-on problem of a pile up of cow numbers without sufficient feed, this latest event has detonated even deeper into the heartbeat of Canadian rustic culture, driving such a hard working vibrant community closer to the brink of extinction.

But, in real health risk terms, these two new cases of BSE do not warrant any need for alarm; since it is little different than a couple of cows walking around with Alzheimer's disease. And in respect of the total number of BSE cases that Canada has experienced – a mere three cases to date – it’s completely insignificant. For Great Britain has suffered 250,000 plus cases of BSE all told (and we are still getting 250 cases per year), which makes one wonder why there has been such a vehement degree of crisis-mongering over three BSE cows in a country as large as Canada.

My tiny farm in the UK has suffered three cases of BSE, yet thankfully we never had to endure the arrival of a slaughter squad of manic mandarins who took out every animal for miles around, or zipped us up into space suits, closing down the farm into a biohazard zone. The disease had merely arrived with some purchased in pedigree cattle, yet never spread across to our own home reared animals – despite 12 months of intermingling between the two groups. Our own BSE problem went away with the affected animals in the slaughter wagon, and has never reared its ugly head again.

This same ‘non infectious’ pattern of BSE cause was exhibited by all of the 250,000 BSE cases that struck the British Isles. Since we have the benefits of a whole epidemiological history book on BSE behind us now, why do the global health authorities choose to deny the indisputable realities of this disease in preference for some ‘nightmare scenario’ hypothesis? A hypothesis that is creating a multitude of major difficulties for so many for no good scientific reason.

In health risk terms, do these Canadian BSE cases actually warrant the virtual shutting down of the entire family farming community of Canada? I think not.

North American governments need to question the underlying basis of the dogma on the origins of BSE.

The next question that the USDA and the Canadian governments need to be asking themselves, is how did these two cows develop BSE if they never had the meat and bone meal tainted feed – the supposed cause of BSE? Unfortunately, the UK government could never face up to this most obvious and pressing question, which is particularly strange, since over 43,000 cows which were born after the 1988 ban on this feed in the UK have still gone down with BSE. Furthermore, many European countries have now had more cases of BSE in cows born after their respective bans, than in cows born before their bans. Canada has now joined this ever growing list.

And since the UK have exported thousands of tons of the MBM feed (from the 1960s to the 1990s) to countries that have never had a single case of BSE, then perhaps it’s about time that we faced up to the blindingly obvious; that the feed did not cause BSE!

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Last updated 03 January 2012