Cattle Crisis

Canada's $2 billion livestock industry faced a major crisis: an outbreak of the dread foot-and-mouth disease, first in Canadian history, was discovered on the cattle ranges of Saskatchewan. An hour after the disease was reported, the U.S. clamped an embargo on Canadian meats and livestock, shutting off Canada's $100 million-a-year trade south of the border. Eastern Canadian provinces banned livestock shipments from the prairies. Business slumped at Western packing houses, and wholesale beef prices were driven down sharply.

The foot-and-mouth plague slipped into Canada in spite of elaborate quarantine precautions to prevent its entry from Europe or Mexico, the nearest infected areas.* The first Canadian case, thought at the time to be vesicular stomatitis (blistering of the mouth), broke out at a Saskatchewan farm on which a German immigrant had worked briefly last November. Investigation proved that the man had worked on an infected farm in Germany shortly before coming to Saskatchewan. Government scientists believed that the virus had been brought in on the immigrant's work clothes.

Ruthless slaughter of infected or exposed stock, plus enforcement of strict quarantine measures, are the only known methods of stamping out the savagely virulent disease. Canada's Department of Agriculture is enforcing both measures to the limit in Saskatchewan. The 22 farms where the disease exists have been tightly quarantined. Bulldozers have begun digging a series of deep trenches on the hard-frozen prairies. As fast as the mass graves can be dug, cattle, sheep and goats from the infected farms are herded into them and shot by Royal Canadian Mounted Police constables with .303 rifles. More than 1,200 animals have already been killed or condemned; the slaughter will continue until the last trace of the disease is buried.

* The U.S. has been free of the disease since 1929.

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