Quote:
Originally Posted by dissentowner
The source is from the farms FB page. Is it the most reliable source? No. Here is the big problem I have with this, the government has ordered the cull of these birds and refuses to test them to see if they are contagious. They claim it is too expensive to do so. The farm and outside supporters have offered to pay to have the testing done and the government had threatened them with charges and jail time if they do so. The farm has indicated if the birds are ordered to be destroyed by the courts they will do it themselves in a humane way but that is not acceptable either because if the CFIA does the cull the government is off the hook to compensate them for the birds. That is 3000 a bird so if they destroy this farms remaining that's a loss of $100,00. There is no reason whatsoever to stop testing these birds if the farm is footing the bill. I mean is it remotely realistic to think a disease that can wipe out half a flock in 48 hours because it kills birds so fast has not killed one bird from this flock in all this time? This isn't about avian flu at this point, it's political. Test the damn birds, if they are safe leave them alone. If there is any red flags then cull the here and properly compensate this farm.
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Again, the issue is that the flock was ordered to be culled when the outbreak was detected in December. End of story. The fact that this has been litigated and dragged out has resulted in a situation where you now have ambiguity. This is atypical, and as I said earlier, could set a dangerous precedent where it becomes more difficult for authorities to manage, not only avian influenza outbreaks, but incursions of other high consequence pathogens (BSE, ASF, CSFV, sheeppox, etc) that follow the same "stamping out" policy. This has real-world implications that go far beyond this farm. The fact of the matter is there is no way of knowing what has transpired over the interim.
If I'm being honest, this is a matter of policy enforcement rather than cost. The issue of money comes into play when you consider large-scale trade ramifications when your country is no longer deemed free of a certain pathogen.
That post from Facebook is written from an emotional, biased and uninformed perspective. It is very reasonable to sympathise with the farm, but this is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. I think a case can be made that standard compensation is probably insufficient given an ostrich is not a run of the mill chicken, goose or duck, but the policy needs to be enforced.
The problem is biosecurity. A case
maybe could have been made if the birds were truly quarantined from the environment until declared pathogen-free (extremely expensive and would likely bankrupt the farm), but the reality is they were and continue to roam freely and there is really not much that can be done to prevent interaction with birds and other mammalian species that share the evironment.
If you look south at the unprecedented detection of avian influenza in cows in 2024 and the subsequent spread amongst dairy herds across the United States, have you ever stopped to wonder why Canada did not suffer a similar fate? Strict biosecurity policies designed to mitigate as much as possible the spread of diseases.