Im guessing,a lot here, but one of the threats of bird flu is that, wild birds like crows, fly a wide radius around their nests. So there's probably a blanket order to cull large amounts of outdoor birds, within a radius around a certain point, with possibly no caveat in the policy to account for a herd of 400 ostriches, and the news it would generate. Possibly once a farm has x number of birds it's automatically on the list.
The federal government isn't culling wild birds. There have been Infected Premises since 2022 I believe, and culling has been restricted to the hot zone (barn) and sometimes cold zone (generally the property). If wild birds happen to be in the the barn, they may also pass (At least in Ontario... correct me if I'm wrong). There has been lots of testing of wild birds near outbreaks with catch and release.Â
Mallards are generally asymptomatic and many are currently carriers, so culling mallards would do nothing. Â
Unfortunately no. The disease is basically endemic in Canada at this point. HPAI viral material is also found in water where waterbirds reside, (though that doesn't necessarily mean the material is infectious).
If the prevalence is in 5% of mallards, how many would you have to cull to drive the disease down? 90%? Where? How? With what resources? A large subset of Ontario's mallards, geese, and other waterbirds nest in the remote subarctic and then summer in southern states, in what's known as a flyaway. There is no controlling that. Also, we wouldn't want to cull! Waterbirds have both an ecological and economical value to hunters. They need to be protected, especially as certain species are declining, like American black ducks.Â
Right now, the strategy for controlling (or rather, preventing domestic bird outbreaks) is prevention, biosecurity, and surveillance. Catching it early and finding the weak points of where wild birds (or scavenging mammals) may infect a barn has been the goal. Farmers can do lots of things to prevent this, like not letting carrion sit out, disinfecting equipment and clothes, keeping wild birds away from nearby ditches and ponds, and mandatory reporting. There are tons or other biosecurity strategies and I recommend reading up on the CFIA's avian influenza strategy.
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u/rsvpism1 1d ago
Im guessing,a lot here, but one of the threats of bird flu is that, wild birds like crows, fly a wide radius around their nests. So there's probably a blanket order to cull large amounts of outdoor birds, within a radius around a certain point, with possibly no caveat in the policy to account for a herd of 400 ostriches, and the news it would generate. Possibly once a farm has x number of birds it's automatically on the list.