Thank you very much for having me here this morning, everybody. It has been interesting to come to Ottawa and meet with you all.
I'll start by just telling you my story about how this all began.
On September 22, I got a phone call from the CFIA telling me that I had shipped a cow to market that made her way to the United States for slaughter and that she had tested positive for tuberculosis.
That was the worst day of my life so far.
The following days were full of conversations with CFIA, and the following week they came out and sat down and quarantined my entire ranch and all my cattle, and we just waited to hear how exactly this was going to go. It was very unclear, and there weren't a whole lot of answers. I had a lot of questions, naturally, and it was tough.
We talked a bit, and the next step was trying to get some testing set up to test these animals, to see in fact if tuberculosis had spread to the rest of our animals. The 22nd was the first contact, and on October 17, just about three weeks later, we actually started the testing on the rest of the animals, and that took a week.
On the ranch, there was lots of stress on animals and people, and we identified 33 reactors out of the rest of the cattle, which was about 450 head in total. Thirty-three out of 450 head were reactors. We waited to hear more on when they were going to go for post-mortems. The only way they can positively confirm TB is with destruction and a post-mortem and testing on tissues.
It was actually November 8 when those 33 reactors left the farm and went to Lacombe, Alberta, to a slaughter facility, where they took samples. It was last week when I actually found out that there were five more out of our herd, so six cattle in total, that tested positive for the preliminary PCR, the genetic test. So far to date, those are the only six animals. They're out of our herd that we ranch together—my family, my father and mother, and my wife and kids. They're all from that herd.
There have been a couple of other neighbours. There's a Hutterite colony and another neighbour of ours who were grouped into the index herd status because of our wintering. We wintered some cattle together, and one of the two herds has been deemed clean so far. There needs to be a culture test. That's the final test that will show exactly if this is for sure. The culture test is the 100% indicator.
I don't know what else.... I have another herd of cattle up north that have been tested, and we're waiting for the reactors to go through the plant and be euthanized and the tissue samples tested.
It has been a long two months. It's two months today actually to the day, and it has been trying. It has been very tough on everyone, as a community. There are 34 ranches in the community, and two just east of us in Saskatchewan have been quarantined, and there are further quarantines going on as we speak. I was contacted by a fellow west of Brooks that I sold cattle to in 2012.
It's very tough. Our whole community is impacted. Almost 90% of the ranches in my area are under quarantine at this point. More than 10,000 head—I think the number is 18,000—are quarantined right now. Very few ranches have been actually tested. The way we're going right now, this is going to take months longer, and once the Alberta winter sets in, it's going to get more complicated.