Bills 62 and 63 Offer Enhanced Protection for Livestock

The General Manager of Manitoba Pork says legislation designed to protect landowners from trespassers will enhance the ability of livestock producers to guard their animals from the introduction of disease. Bill 62, the Animal Diseases Amendment Act and Bill 63, the Petty Trespass Amendment and Occupiers Liability Act, introduced by the Manitoba government, will the increase the protection of landowners from trespassers.

Cam Dahl, the General Manager of Manitoba Pork, says the legislation will help ensure trespassers who break a farm's biosecurity will be penalized.

Clip-Cam Dahl-Manitoba Pork:

It helps ensure that people can't just come onto your farm and breach your biosecurity zones and that there would be penalties for doing that. I think all of your listeners will understand that now after over a year of COVID and protecting human biosecurity.

The same is true for pork and for chickens and turkeys and dairy cattle in Manitoba, that that biosecurity is critically important to preserving the health of our animals. The threat from foreign animal disease is real. African Swine Fever for example has resulted in well over two million hogs dying in China and we don't want that here.

I think the key point is the purpose of these two acts. It's to help protect animals, based around that assuring of biosecurity and ensuring that outside people are not going  to breach that biosecurity and bring in disease, whether it's from the next farm, whether it's something that was in the ditch or whether it's a foreign animal disease. The purpose is to protect our farm families and the animals that they care for.