Mad Cow Disease Divides Canadian And U.S. Ranchers
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 12, 2005
LUNDBRECK, Alberta -- On opposite sides of the blue-cold Rocky Mountains, two men on horseback roam the grassy prairie each day, checking the cattle on their ranches.
Until two years ago, Hugh Lynch-Staunton in Alberta and Jim Baker in Hot Springs, Montana, were kindred souls in the saddle -- strangers who shared the same pride and tradition, doing the same work on tough land.
Then four cows came between them.
The discovery of four Canadian head of cattle with mad cow disease in the past two years has drawn a line of anger and suspicion between cattlemen who used to operate in seamless cooperation between Canada and the United States.
It has sundered a multibillion-dollar business that straddled the border, bringing fundamental changes in the industry that puts steak on American tables and sends hamburger worldwide.
While the dispute is being fought in the courts, ranchers in Canada seethe as they lose money, while ranchers in the United States raise the alarm that Canadian beef may ruin the reputation of their herds if the closed border is reopened to Canadian cows.
The key question for consumers -- whether beef is safe to eat -- sometimes becomes lost in the clash over money, a U.S. federal judge has concluded.
Canadian ranchers have lost more than $4 billion, according to a government study. U.S. ranchers have lost almost $3 billion in export sales by taint of proximity to Canada. Canadian federal and provincial governments have paid another $1.5 billion to stave off wholesale bankruptcies on the ranches.
Without those emergency payments, many cattlemen would have gone bust, Lynch-Staunton said. His income has plunged now that his cattle are not allowed across the border. He recently suggested to his two sons and daughter, half in jest, that they should use their college degrees to get jobs off the ranch.
His joke met with stony silence, he said. His children, who wandered off after college, eventually came back to help raise 700 head of cattle on Antelope Butte Ranch in Lundbreck, 80 miles south of Calgary.
Now, they take turns riding the range on horseback twice a day, watching for wolves and the occasional grizzly bear, working with the same pride honed through four generations of ranching.
"There's something about growing things, about dealing with lives," said Lynch-Staunton, a fit man of 61 with sun-washed eyes and a weathered face.
On a recent tour of part of his 11,000 acre-ranch, Lynch-Staunton wrestled a newborn calf from under barbed wire, and then stopped to admire a line of wild elk silhouetted on a nearby ridge. Off in the distance is Chief Mountain in Montana; the yellow-and-green prairie spills toward it.
"This is why you do this," Lynch-Staunton said, taking in the expanse. "If you're here on a good-horse morning like this, and you're out checking your cows when the sun comes up. People who get rich in the oil business retire and try to buy this. I've had it every day."
Across the continental divide, through the snowy Rocky Mountains and down the spine of the continent into Montana, the Bakers see their lives in similar terms.
"I can't imagine doing anything else," said Kim Baker, 37, who shares five children, a clutch of dogs and the upkeep of 600 head of cattle with her husband on their ranch in Hot Springs.
Every time a cattle sale approaches, the Bakers listen for rumors. Like gamblers waiting for the dealer's card, they nervously tune in to the noon stock report and pray they don't hear the words "mad cow."
"Even the whisper of it sends the prices plummeting," said Jim Baker, 45, a mustachioed rancher whose ancestors homesteaded a century ago.
So far, the Bakers have come out ahead. Every report of a cow being tested in the state has turned out to have negative results, and the price the Bakers get for their Montana-raised beef has risen steadily.
But the Bakers worry that if Canadian beef crosses the border again, another animal will be found with mad cow -- clinically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) -- and consumers will balk at U.S. beef.
"We don't want to get BSE here. It would be catastrophic for us," Kim Baker said.
It would be a blow to price and pride for the Bakers. The cattle industry in Britain collapsed after discovery of the disease there in 1986. The neurological disease can spread to humans who eat infected beef, leading to a horrifying and inevitable death. In Europe, more than 100 people have died.
As two of her boys, 7 and 9, stormed full of energy into the farmhouse kitchen after school, Kim Baker recoiled at the prospect of causing a BSE-related death.
"If you sold a cow that made somebody sick, that would be horrendous," she said with a shudder.
But the herds were so intermingled before 2003 that some experts say it is likely -- even inevitable -- that the disease is in the U.S. herd.
Before 2003, Canadian and U.S. cattlemen were knit in a cross-border business that was a model for free trade. Canadian ranchers sold their cattle to feedlot operators like Glen Thompson, near Lethbridge, Alberta. He fattened them on corn and barley for six months, and then shipped them -- 10 tractor truckloads a day -- to slaughterhouses in the United States.
About 1 million head of live cattle were trucked south each year to Utah, Washington, Nebraska, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. In return, cut beef flowed north, and U.S. marketers sold both countries' beef overseas.
When the border was closed hours after the discovery of the first Alberta cow with BSE on May 20, 2003, ranchers were left with cows stranded in the field and Thompson had 18,000 head of cattle in his pen and no buyers. Thompson said he lost millions.
Four months later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ruled that boneless meat from beef less than 30 months old and slaughtered in Canada could be imported. Canadian slaughterhouses leaped into action. Last year they shipped 60 percent more cut beef into the United States than in 2003.
Now, with no label of origin to raise their concerns, U.S. consumers are eating beef from cows that are not allowed to cross the border. But while Canadian packinghouses are expanding, U.S. packinghouses are hurting for business. Some may close.
In a move that could rescue the meatpackers, the USDA recently announced that young cows could be brought live over the border starting March 7. The agency termed Canada's BSE problem a "minimal risk." But the move was blocked when a group led by the Ranchers Cattlemen Action Legal Fund or R-CALF, filed suit and won a temporary injunction from federal judge in Montana keeping the border closed to live Canadian cows.
R-CALF argues that Canadian BSE cows will mix with U.S. cattle, poisoning the reputation of U.S. herds. The group says Canada tests too few cows for BSE and does not take aggressive enough measures to make sure diseased meat does not reach consumers.
"We are allowing Canada to practice the weakest measures in the world," Bill Bullard, a former rancher from South Dakota and the head of R-CALF, said from Billings, Montana. "Canada is not interested in finding a true prevalence of the disease in their herd."
Nonsense, reply Canadian authorities. They have boosted testing from 8,000 cows in 2004 to a level that will reach 60,000 this year. More extensive testing is statistical overkill, they say.
"Once you detect the disease you have to take certain measures. Both Canada and U.S. have taken those measures," said Gary Little, a senior veterinarian for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in Ottawa. "We have done all the right things."
But R-CALF's arguments won a strong backing by Federal District Court Judge Richard F. Cebull. In a scathing ruling in Billings on March 2, Cebull said the USDA was in too much of a rush proclaim Canadian beef safe.
The USDA "ignored its statutory mandate to protect the health and welfare of the people of the United States," the judge said. To open the border "subjects the entire U.S. beef industry to potentially catastrophic damages and presents a genuine risk of death for U.S. consumers."
The Justice Department is appealing the judge's injunction.
Some U.S. ranchers are wary of R-CALF's stridency, fearing they may find themselves in the same spot as ranchers north of the border.
"If we are successful in convincing the consumer that Canadian beef is not safe, and we get a case, how will we maintain consumer confidence?" said Steve Pilcher, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association.
Lynch-Staunton said: "It's like calling your twin sister ugly."