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October. The cattle come off the mountain pastures and the prairie grbadlands into the corrals where the calves will be separated from their mothers. The lucky ones are going to stay on the farm or ranch as it is repositioned. Others will be contracted to a direct feed where they will learn how to drink from a waterer and feed out a bunk. No more mother with warm milk and physical comfort but plenty of pacing, bawling and stress.
But the worst affected are those who are bought by the buyer by an order buyer for export. They must be processed, tested, tagged and held until the paperwork is completed, and sent for signature and returned before they can be loaded for the trip to the border and the final destination. The stress on these calves is substantial, many will become ill with pneumonia and some will die or suffer from chronic lung problems.
The latter group is our concern. It is time to call Wilbur in Helena, Montana, and determine the date after which the occurrence of stress. The deep Texas drawl confirms that he has the same concern for the calves as we have agreed to a date, with the rules under the United States Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Health of Animals Branch, after which the calves can cross the border without testing for bluetongue or being held up for other reasons. The date is set and the cattle industry is informed.
At the United States Animal Health Association conferences I finally puts Wilbur. Not a big man, smaller than his voice would suggest, but pure Texas from his Stetson, black and white. Lean and tough, bone, sinew and tanned rawhide without an ounce of spare flesh was Wilbur.
But Wilbur had a history prior to being responsible for enforcing the federal rules of animal health in the State of Montana. He was involved in research, not cattle but sheep, and an enigmatic confusing disease which affected only adult sheep. Normal animals with no other sign of illness would have been introduced into the future. The disease was first described in Scotland and was called scrapie by the sensitive Scots. No one knew the cause of this condition and it affected only certain members of the flock, only in adulthood and there was no cure. It was not caused by a bacterium and the science of virology was in its infancy. These tiny diseases were separated into "filterable" and "non-filterable," depending on their size, and are likely to be unrecoverable and unseen.
The site of Wilbur's trial involving infected sheep was the end of the United States of America Basin, an area important to the petroleum industry because of the type of clay out chips of rock for examination by the geologist to determine the presence of oil or gas. It was neutral, white clay, unthreatening to living organisms. When Wilbur's investigation was revealed, the data was recorded and evaluated, and the sheep were destroyed and left blank.
We go to Iceland next, a volcanic inhospitable island in the North Atlantic, which was first discovered by the United States. Here on that North Atlantic island, hot springs bubbled at the foot of glaciers, volcanic mountains stood on flat plains, short-season crops could be grown in some areas and a steady diet of fish brought on a hunger for mutton. So sheep are imported from Iceland. But they developed scrapie and had to be destroyed. For a decade and a half of the future, we are ready for sale, we are imported and housed on it. But in a short time they developed scrapie. This article shows that the organism, which is more likely to be affected by the disease, is at least 14 years old and possibly much longer.
Back in southern Montana at the research station where Wilbur had kept his sheep, a project involving the wintering grounds of the wilds on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains was underway. At the conclusion of the trial, these fetuses have been reported to be of high quality in the foothills.
Meanwhile, people in Asia, particularly the Chinese, who are rapidly becoming more affluent and increasingly active, have been demanding ever-increasing volumes of de veloping. "Asiatic deer had spindly antler, New Zealand deer sported larger numbers of antler but numbers were limited. North American elk had antlers that reached as far back as the bulls' rumps when they walked through the forests. Antlers which in the velvet and full of blood and hormones weighed in excess of 40 pounds. This opportunity may not have been pbaded by the Member State of the United States. Permits to capture elk from the herds in the foothills have been established and some of them have become more common and have become the basis of a new North American industry. Demand has been greatly increased and interstated and internationally.
But all was not well. Occasionally, one of these magnificent animals would begin to lose condition, waste away and die. Then another would do the same. The symptoms have been suggested in the literature and have been reported in Scotland and have been called "Chronic Wasting Disease."
Not only that, but they are affected by this disease, which is known as CWD, but now and in the United States. The cause was unknown, but those were, died.
At about the same time, they have been threatening both animals and animals in Europe.This was a newborn disease that affected adults, they became unco-ordinated, nervous, then unable to rise and eventually died. It was named "Mad Cow Disease" or "Spongiform Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis." Frantic efforts to learn the cause and method of spread of this disease are underway and panic in other countries. it misapplied, to learn more about the condition. Transmission to humans has been suggested and caused panic. Years went by and millions were spent before Dr. Stanley Prusiner learned that the cause of the disease was not a normal cell wall into the cell where they were needed. The string was called "prion" and in animals affected by BSE was misfolded in the mirror image of the normal prion and this was caused by the deadly disease in susceptible animals and humans.
Prion research proliferated and it has become known that BSE has been biochemically identical to those caused by human spongiform encephalitis. A prion was established as the cause of CWD and scrapie but the BSE was not identical to that which was nor CWD, but the latter was identical to one another. Only the BSE prion. Preamble also shows that the prions were shed, depending on the species involved, in various body fluids such as urine and saliva, and in the flesh eaten by predators and humans. Stringent laws were put in place to stop the spread of these dreaded diseases and international trade in many commodities was restricted for years. Ruminant animal products to other ruminants have been known to be effective in preventing ruminant diseases. It was shown that there was a genetic predilection or protection against the spread of these diseases in the world of animals, but those who do not have the right genetic makeup when exposed to the misfolded prions faced certain death.
Unfortunately, we were affected by CWD; The North American Continent, which has been growing up in the Rocky Mountain Foothills to the Carolinas, has been widely distributed. It still appears sporadically in captive herds in Canada. The spread has been reported in the United States and has not been reported in the Florida Everglades.
A cartoonist at the time of the Viet Nam war, Walt Kelly, commented on the human condition and other social issues through the voice of "Pogo," an opossum who lived under the Cypresses festooned with Spanish moss in the Florida Everglades along with all his little animal friends. One strip explained the foregoing tragedy extremely well, years before the actual events unfolded. In that strip, Pogo stood up in the prow of his swamp friends around him and he stated: "Gentlemen! We found the enemy! And he is us! "How bloody true!
Larry Delver is a veterinarian and retired export veterinary program specialist with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
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