Withholding a full guarantee, officials say there were zero signs of TB among elk culled at Suffield

While visual inspections carried out by Alberta Environment and Parks scientists found no evidence of bovine tuberculosis in Suffield’s elk population during this year’s hunt, one local official is confirming no comprehensive culture testing was done to ensure the herd was absolutely TB free.

“The CFIA has the only lab in the province that can do that work,” says Joel Nicholson, senior wildlife biologist overseeing the Suffield hunt. “The Alberta government does not have a lab equipped to do that kind of (comprehensive) testing. There is right now only one lab that can do this work. There are no private contractors, there are no provincial agencies. There is one place that this work can be done, and has the actual lab to do it.”

Nicholson says his team had special training on how to spot the signs of TB in elk prior to the hunt, and they made hunters coming into the range do a mandatory briefing on how to recognize those signs as well. They also distributed photographs of the TB0-infected tissue and inspected the lymphnodes of every animal killed for signs of the disease.

“If we had found any abnormal tissue,” he adds, “the CFIA would have tested that tissue. But we didn’t find any. The big thing was they didn’t want 500 samples ... The CFIA said we do not want samples from you because they were fully at, or over, their capacity already with the domestic animal samples they had. Their risk models had testing the elk as an extremely low priority.”

Nicholson says testing in the future may involve more in-depth lab culturing, but those guidelines were for senior ministry officials to determine.

“We found zero evidence of TB in the wildlife (these past few years), but obviously we will continue to monitor that in the future ... We do take this seriously. We want healthy cattle on the landscape and we want healthy elk on the landscape.”

He stresses the elk-culling program is working at CFB Suffield, and the current elk herd population is considered to be at low risk of having TB.

“There is absolutely no evidence this TB strain came from elk, or any of the elk (at CFB Suffield) are infected or implicated in any way. And yet there has been an inordinate amount of attention paid to the elk. We certainly have elk issues there, but we have taken the elk population down both inside and outside the base. Our current population estimate is about 3,800 head on CFB Suffield. We have actually been very successful in depopulating the herd the last number of years.”