Right now we have Chinese buyers who come right to the farm. I have a Chinese buyer who comes out to our farm.
Different producers will bring their antlers to our place. We weigh them, grade them, and store them in freezer units until we get enough to ship the product out. We have to go through CFIA and an exporting company out of Calgary to get all the documentation and all the documentation from the farms to load this container to ship out. Once it's on the ship, they don't care.
When China gets it back there, the tags are taken off. We're told to package it into smaller boxes so that it's easier for them to carry, and to probably hide it on bicycles, and away they go. They move it to wherever they want.
To get our product out of Canada with the regulations of our own CFIA, even though the products are coming off clean farms, we are still scrutinized with paperwork. That is the biggest problem. No farm can get a clean bill of health from CFIA, because if you want to export antlers, they have to give you an export of antlers declaration. If you somehow don't fill out an inventory form, they'll say you can't ship it. It's a producer's problem, and these things can be looked after.
CFIA is after us more for rules and regulations right now, instead of saying let's go to Korea, we want to open up the borders again, and our animals are clean.
It's what we want CFIA to do, because it's going to be like the bird flu. It's going to be like BSE. CWD is no different. We're going to have a case come up someplace. We have to work with it, and we understand that. We're not saying we want them to tell us we're all disease-free, but we want them to work with us and we will work with them, because it's going to pop up someplace again, just like any other disease.