Dr. Byram W. Bridle

I published an article about how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) failed to follow the science when trying to justify their horrific extermination of hundreds of healthy ostriches on a farm in a remote location in British Columbia, Canada. I addressed their misleading claim that it was necessary to safeguard human and animal health. Both science and plain common sense demonstrated that their claim was misinformation.

How legitimate is their claim that killing was necessary to preserve the export market?

Now, I cannot allow the CFIA’s second misleading rationale for slaughtering the ostriches to go unchallenged. Specifically, the CFIA claimed that the killing was also required to safeguard Canada’s almost billion-dollar poultry export market. The issue is that exports can be suspended if the policies of the World Organization for Animal Health are contravened. But what the CFIA failed to disclose to the public was that our country is not considered a single geographical zone when it comes to these policies. Rather, it is divided into numerous zones.

When looking at the World Organization for Animal Health’s Terrestrial Animal Health Code, Article 10.4.3 jumps out as being particularly important in this case. It states:

“A country or zone may be considered free from high pathogenicity avian influenza when” “absence of infection with high pathogenicity avian influenza viruses, based on surveillance […] has been demonstrated in the country or zone for the past 12 months”.

During this twelve-month timeframe, exports from anywhere within the affected zone would presumably have to be suspended and biosecurity polices adhered to. Indeed, this could be problematic if it meant shutting down the export market of an entire country for an entire year. But that was not the case here. Consider these facts:

1. The farmers at the heart of this case had no need to maintain an export market within their region for the viability of their farming operation.
2. Biosecurity protocols imposed by the CFIA were already being adhered to.
3. It is my understanding that the ostrich farm was isolated within a remote designated zone. Therefore, suspending exports from that zone would not risk harming export potential for other farmers. Even if the zone did incorporate far-away farms, the CFIA could have done the right thing and attempted negotiating redrawing of boundaries with the World Organization for Animal Health to prevent or minimize indirect harm to other farms.

In other words, the ostriches could have been tested after the flock recovered from the disease outbreak, with testing ending twelve months later. If these tests were consistently negative, the World Organization for Animal Health would have officially declared the zone housing the ostriches to be virus-free and it would lift its moratorium on exports from that isolated zone.

My assessment is that this would have allowed the ostriches to live, with no substantial negative impact on the ability to export poultry products from Canada.

Further, common sense also places the CFIA’s rationale into question. Their battle with the farmers took place over the better part of a year while they apparently ignored this subsection of the policy, yet Canada’s poultry export market continued unhindered.

So I am curious as to why the CFIA has been so hell-bent on killing healthy ostriches to purportedly preserve Canada’s export market. Why didn’t they advocate for the farmers from the very beginning by leaning on clauses like Article 10.4.3 to negotiate with the World Organization for Animal Health? I thought that government agencies were supposed to serve the public that pays them. I saw no evidence of the CFIA trying to help the farmers. Instead they seemed focused on doing everything but try to help them. The optics would have been much better for the CFIA if they could produce documentation showing that they rigorously negotiated on behalf of the farmers about Article 10.4.3 with the World Organization for Animal Health but the latter blatantly refused to honour the requests.

Ultimately, it seems to me that the CFIA not only failed to follow the science, but it was also selective in its interpretation and defense of the policies.

It also makes me wonder if Article 10.4.3 had anything to do with why the CFIA was so adamant about not allowing the birds to be tested almost one year after the outbreak. To have demonstrated an absence of the virus almost one year later would have shown that they were on the cusp of being able to use Article 10.4.3 to restore Canada’s coveted country-wide avian influenza-free status.

By the way, all countries claiming to have avian influenza-free status are misleading people. Avian influenza viruses are endemic. They are carried and transmitted by wild birds, especially waterfowl, that migrate around the globe.

The most hypocritical aspect of this is that the people responsible for the deaths of hundreds of valuable, healthy ostriches that were almost certainly virus-free (prove me wrong with data), likely let their own kids play on beaches and parks that are routinely populated by ducks, geese, and seagulls, and stipple-painted with the feces of these birds that serve as natural reservoirs for the virus.

All hail the hypocritical virtue signaling!

To be consistent with their reasoning, every person that supported what the CFIA did to the healthy ostriches should never step foot on any premises frequented by wild birds.