Description

Even seventy years later Gordon Lea still remembered the horrible day back in the early 1920s when his family’s cows, “all except for a few little calves” were loaded on trucks and driven away. His father Walter Maxwell Lea, an accomplished farmer and breeder of championship horses and Holstein dairy cows, had served multiple terms in the provincial legislature, often in charge of the province’s agricultural affairs and his son proudly remembered him as “an extremely good and progressive farmer” with a keen eye to discern healthy animals. And so, when his father noticed that milk production was dropping and some of the cows were coughing, he called in a local veterinarian to perform an innovative new test that could reveal the presence of the deadly bovine tuberculosis bacterium (BTB) even in cows appearing perfectly healthy. Gordon remembered “the terrible blow” when the results confirmed that the entire herd was infected and the only solution was slaughter. Many other Island dairy farmers and their families faced the same devastating news in the 1920s as the disease made its way across the Island. Sick cows were not only bad for business, but impacted human health as well. Children were particularly vulnerable to the deadly bacterium carried in the meat and milk of infected cows.