Government won't make animal IDs mandatory after all

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Bush administration is abandoning plans to make farmers and ranchers register their cows, pigs and chickens in a nationwide database intended to help limit disease outbreaks.

Faced with widespread opposition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Nov. 22 the animal tracking program should remain voluntary.

"Really embracing this as a voluntary program will help the trust issues that some farmers and ranchers have raised about the national animal identification system," said Bruce Knight, undersecretary for marketing and regulation.

"I'm certainly hoping to move beyond some of the very emotional debates on animal ID," Knight said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Many cattle ranchers are wary of the program because they want records kept confidential and don't want to pay for the system. The industry estimates it could cost more than $100 million annually to register and report the movements of livestock and poultry.

"It is critically important for USDA to explain what the cost of this program will be, and how the proprietary information will be protected, before they go any further," said Bill Bullard, chief operating officer of R-CALF USA, a Western ranchers' group.

"We believe USDA has gone too far, too fast," Bullard said.

Not just individual ranchers are skeptical. The state of Vermont decided in August to hold off on participating in the system because officials were worried about the privacy of farm information.

So far, about 23 percent of the nation's ranches, feed lots, livestock barns and other facilities have registered their premises with the USDA.

The department's goal is to have all premises registered by January 2008 and to have full participation in the system by January 2009.

The system would identify cattle individually with tags or other devices. There are high-tech ways to monitor their movements, often with radio-frequency ear tags but also with retinal scans of eyes or even DNA testing.

Hogs and poultry could be registered in groups, because that typically is how they move through the food chain.

Last year, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns announced that participation would be mandatory by 2009. Later, Johanns said it would be required someday.

Knight said 2009 is still the goal for full participation.

"I am very confident that this program will stand on its own as a voluntary program," he said.

Knight added: "Unfortunately, I think some of the debate of mandatory versus voluntary has actually distracted folks to the point that it's impeded participation. And I'd much rather just get about the business of making the program operational."

First promised in response to the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in this country, the tracking system would pinpoint an animal's movements within 48 hours after a disease was discovered.

Investigators never found all 80 of the cattle that came to the U.S. from Canada with the infected dairy cow that became the country's first case of BSE disease in 2003.

There are more than 90 million cows, 60 million hogs and nearly 9 billion chickens in the United States.

Date: 11/29/06

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