“Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY, deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY.” Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
How well does the government protect you from drunk drivers? How well did the government protect the victims of Katrina from vandalism, looting, rape, and murder? How well does the government protect the citizens on the Mexican border? How well does the government stop the immigration of illegal aliens? How well does the government protect school children from illegal drugs? How well does the government protect you from the flu which kills 36,000 Americans each year?
Are you a meat eater? Do you wear leather boots or carry a leather purse? Are you ready to pay higher prices for your steak dinner and your Tony Lamas?
Dare I ask you to take action before another of our God given rights is blatantly stolen? Or do you believe we should all be responsible and “cooperate” with the government? The Jews tried that in Germany. It didn’t work out so well.
To buy into the idea that the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) will protect our animals from terrorism is naïve at best. To buy into the USDA statement that NAIS was implemented strictly to save us from the spread of disease in our food animal chain is worse than naïve.
It’s not about protection or control of animal disease; we already have safeguards in place in every livestock species sector. These controls have proven sufficient time and again. The USDA admits that. What they don’t admit is that NAIS is about big agri-business selling beef overseas. It’s about computer chip companies making millions of dollars selling hundreds of millions of RFIDs and millions of transponders to people forced to buy their products. It’s about private database companies making millions recording and storing billions of details about where you live, what you own, and what you do with what you own.
NAIS does nothing for anyone except the Monsantos, ADMs, and Cargills of the world. If you’re not one of those, you will pay the cost of these corporations’ future profits with your hard earned dollars and the last vestiges of your Constitutional rights.
The USDA has been slowly, gently promoting the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) with propaganda designed to make animal owners believe it’s their duty to comply for the sake of National Security. Once the program becomes mandatory, as it is slated to be by 2009, the NAIS will be handed over to Homeland Security. Any person who owns livestock animals or purchases any products made from these animals will be directly affected by this program.
The comprehensive nature of the scope of NAIS is not in alignment with its stated purposes. The stated purpose is the control of disease of “pre-harvest” animals. However, the species included in the program exceeds the limits of animals harvested for food or that can transmit disease to humans. The complete list includes: cattle, swine, sheep, goats, horses, poultry, bison, deer, elk, llamas, and alpacas.
Secondly, the USDA fails to examine existing protocols to determine if these procedures are adequate as they exist or with some modifications. Nearly every animal industry has systems in place to locate and control disease; if they do not work it generally is due to lack of human reporting. The NAIS will fail for the same reason.
Thirdly, the cost of the manpower, technical support, hardware and computer systems required to make the NAIS program successful far exceeds any budgetary projections made by the USDA or State commissions such as the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC). NAIS Implementation Plan states: “The ability to achieve the 48-hour traceback goal is directly related to the percentage of animal movements that are recorded and will require significant infrastructure throughout the pre-harvest production chain.” Yet, there is no discussion on where the funds for this infrastructure will come from or what the true cost to animal owners will be.
Fourth, as stated in the text of the NAIS Implementation Plan, the success of the program is dependent upon “a high degree of producer participation”. As we all know, any system dependent upon human willingness to participate has a major design flaw. We already have those types of systems; we don’t need another one with the same flaw to overlap or supersede existing ones.
Fifth, as stated in the Implementation Plan, “To achieve high reliability with the 48-hour traceback goal, a high percentage of animal movement records need to be collected and available electronically.” The USDA reports a current population of 97.1 million cattle. Add to that, all the sheep, goats, horses, elk, deer, swine, bison, llamas, and alpacas. The poultry industry produces over 7 BILLION chickens per year.
That’s over 200 million animals and 7 billion birds, for which EVERY movement must be tracked in order for the NAIS system to be effective. We can’t keep up with kids skipping school, we can’t find aliens with expired visas, we can’t stop illegals from crossing a defined border. But, we’re going to keep track of how movements of how many animals? And, we’re going to keep all that computerized data secret and secure?
Sixth, the monumental amount of data stored to track every movement of hundreds of millions of animals might not crash the computer systems, but who is going to enforce the reporting process? Every failure to report movement compromises the success of the program. The Plan states, “The completeness of animal movement records will directly affect the effectiveness of the response to a detected disease and the reliability for achieving the long-term 48-hour traceback/trace forward goal.” Doomed from the start.
Seventh, one provision allows for Group Identification Numbers to be placed upon any segment of a species that is formed into a herd or group that moves through the pre-harvest chain together from birth to termination. This allows one animal to be tagged that is representative of the entire group. To date, I have found nothing to explain how the integrity of these groups will be maintained. If a rancher has a herd of 2,000 cattle and 10 of them get sick, he’s going to separate those animals from the herd. This herd is now compromised and those 10 head have no ID tag. Who’s to say when, if, and where those 10 head are put back in a herd? And how does anyone know which herd they were mingled with?
Also, this provision radically reduces the costs to the large herd owners. If your herd doesn’t qualify for a Group ID, then you must tag/chip every animal. Obviously, a small farm’s cost will be greater than a corporate competitor’s, giving the mega-producers even more of an edge. (In case you don’t know, it’s the giant corporate agri-businesses that are supporting NAIS.) Not to mention, you can’t cheat the system by switching animals from one herd to another like producers with Group ID tags could.
Eighth, the only cost being discussed at this point in the USDA Plan pertains to premises registration. This cost will be nominal (FREE if you sign up now!) and has been portrayed by some to be “just another tax” and nothing to be bothered about. However, the cost of individual ID tags or chips, their implantation, and the cost to have them scanned at every location through the life of the animals has not been discussed.
Once the program reaches this level of implementation, it will be too late to change your mind about participating; thus, the cost cannot be controlled by market demand. It will be determined by the need to secure funds to operate the NAIS system or to fill government and private manufacturers’ coffers. No one really knows how much that will be and it won’t matter because if you don’t want to pay $1,000 fines, have your kid’s pony confiscated, or go to jail for non-compliance, you will pay.
Finally, the NAIS system will be largely dependent upon RFID chips. The information on these chips can be read by homemade gadgets. The information can be changed after implantation by homemade gadgets. How does technology that can be easily altered by any high school techie protect the American food chain?
The NAIS, as it is being implemented, CANNOT protect animals from contamination via terrorism or disease. By the time this fact becomes history, the government will have all of your personal and private property, animal ownership and usage stored in questionably secure databases. The cost of owning livestock will have risen. The cost of every product made from animals will have increased. Animal owners will have become burdened with reporting requirements punishable with $1,000 fines for failure to report, for every time you haul a bull to the sale, ride over to the neighbors’ ranch to help with branding, or take your daughter to the 4H barrel race.
I forgot. What country do we live in? I’m certain George Washington, Ben Franklin and the rest of the boys would be looking for new worlds to conquer if they were alive today. Will you fight for free America or hold your arm out to get your number tattooed?
Karen Brown is a horse trainer and horse owner at the Solitaire Ranch in Bandera, Texas. She has been training horses for over 20 years and now specializes in natural horsemanship with a focus on problem horses, starting young horses under saddle, and teaching owners to communicate with and understand their equine partners. Karen writes articles on all aspects of horsemanship including riding, training, stable management, and healthcare for various equine publications.