Lab in Riding Mountain National Park front line of fight
By: Bill Redekop
RIDING MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK — ‘Hot knife through butter’ comes to mind watching Roxanne Grzela’s knife slice so easily through the back of the elk’s severed head.
The blade comes in at an angle behind the elk’s ears and jawline. Grzela then splits it open like a coconut. She fishes inside for something — lymph nodes — takes them out, and now she could be anyone in a kitchen — anyone covered with an incredible amount of blood, that is.
She slices the adenoid at quarter-inch intervals, like cutting up a green onion, looking for abscesses — white blisters — that will indicate bovine tuberculosis.
“I could eat my lunch in here. It just doesn’t bother me,” Grzela says, standing in her raincoat-yellow rubber apron and sky-blue rubber gloves, all bloodied. “I look at this as doing my part to keep the wildlife population healthy.”
TB or not TB. That is the question for the wildlife lab in Riding Mountain National Park. At peak times, Grzela can be cutting up to 100 heads a day.
Hunters have been a huge help. They have delivered over 3,000 elk and 6,000 deer heads and lungs since 1998.
Hunters around the park are required by law to turn in the samples of any elk or white-tailed deer they kill and state the location of the kill. But it would be easy not to, and after a full day hunting, it’s not something a person wants to do. They get a “Wildlife Cooperators” ball cap or tuque for their trouble.
The parks runs its own blood-testing program, as well. Net guns are shot from a helicopter to enmesh an elk.
The netted animal’s legs are then trussed with hobbles and it is blindfolded, which serves to calm the animal. Six vials of blood are taken and the blood is sent to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency lab in Ottawa.
The elk are back on their hooves and released within 20 minutes but with GPS radio collars around their necks. The radio collars are bulky, weighing about four pounds. The elk weigh up to 1,000 pounds.
If a blood analysis comes back TB-positive — the correct term is “suspicious” since it’s not 100 per cent accurate — the animal is tracked down and destroyed, and its lymph nodes are removed and shipped to Ottawa for a lengthier culture test. If negative, the GPS is programmed to unbuckle the collar on a certain date and drop to the forest floor. It’s another one of Grzela’s jobs to track down and retrieve those GPS collars.
In some ways, bovine TB isn’t so catastrophic a disease. The animals can live for many years before symptoms even begin to appear. And it’s generally only in older animals (elk can live up to 20 years). Any risk to humans from eating the meat is very low, although it’s not recommended.
The problem is, “It’s hard to detect and hard to get rid of,” said Doug Bergeson, Parks Canada ecosystem scientist. It will spread from elk to deer to livestock to wolves. All four are herd or pack animals, where TB tends to gain a foothold.
The real threat of bovine TB is to the cattle sector that surrounds the park. It’s mainly spread to cattle through feed. Elk amble into the hay stations — little islands of cut hay on farm fields — and their saliva gets into the feed. Cattle digest the saliva and contract the disease. Manitoba Agriculture has funded barrier fencing and guard dogs for producers to keep deer and elk out of feed, and farmers have been getting their hay rolls off the fields earlier.
But governments seem to be winning the war on bovine TB, begun in earnest after the disease was found in cattle west of the park in 2003. That’s when the Parks Canada blood-testing program started.
Since 2003, 46 elk and 11 deer have tested postive for bovine TB. But in 2003, 13 out of 150 elk tested positive. In the last two years, just three out of 350 elk tested positive.