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Last Updated March 10, 2010

Veterinary Infrastructure

Introduction:

In the Province of Ontario (for example), there are approximately 1,500 veterinarians involved in a veterinary infrastructure at the local, provincial, and federal levels. Services provided by this veterinarian infrastructure create:

1. Protocols through which legislation and regulation become regional, national and international meat and fish industries;
2. Animal care and disease management strategies to ensure animals, people, animal food products, and animal by-products are kept safe from abuse and disease; and,
3. Foundations upon which humane societies and dog pounds control dog populations.

Services provided by veterinarians (see Diagram 1) create an enormous global veterinary infrastructure. In essence, veterinarians are involved with every species of animal for the development and implementation of their care, inspection, regulation, use, transport, slaughter, and consumption.  

Unfortunately, Aboriginal people do not have a veterinary infrastructure to replace or harmonize with existing provincial and federal veterinary infrastructure services. The root origin of this infrastructure void arises from the exclusion of Aboriginal rights from federal and provincial veterinary-related legislation and services. As such, there are recurrent public health crises caused by unsafe food, out-of-control dog populations, and nuisance wildlife. Further, Aboriginal people are prevented from developing a sustainable traditional economy based on the trade of inspected, safe traditional food (wild meat and fish); a country food infrastructure.

Services supplied by veterinarians considered part of a nation’s core food and community infrastructures in the developed world involve:

• Maintaining quality disease-free meat and fish supplies;
• Zoonotic disease prevention (Examples include: Rabies, tuberculosis, salmonellosis, toxoplasmosis, scabies, cryptococcosis, psittacosis, campylobacteriosis, yersiniosis, leptospirosis, brucellosis, echinococcosis, visceral larval migrans, strongyloidiasis, giardiasis, trichinosis, blastomycosis, tularaemia, and etc.);
• Companion animal (dogs and cats) population control;
• Nuisance or over-populated wildlife control;
• Farmed and wild animal herd health management; and,
• The prevention of animal suffering.

Canada’s Aboriginal nations have a right to develop their own traditional country food infrastructure and access the same public health solutions for their communities’ infrastructure as non-native Canadians. This includes the development of missing Aboriginal veterinary infrastructure and its offshoot wild meat and fish industries, wild animal health monitoring systems, and dog control/humane society solutions.

© Christian Aboriginal Infrastructure Developments

Last Updated March 10, 2010