TAHC in Apparent Attempt to Thwart NAIS Opposition
In what appears to be an effort to thwart opposition to its proposed Animal Identification program, the Texas Animal Health Commission has pushed forward its meeting date by nearly two months.
And in what could be considered an obvious attempt to make attendance more difficult for opponents, the TAHC has set 8 a.m. as a time to discuss the matter on a "work day" for most Texans. The meeting is schedule for Thursday, March 23 at the Marriott Hotel, 2600 La Frontera Blvd., Round Rock, Texas – just north of Austin. (The March 23 meeting was canceled and rescheduled for May 4).
While it appears the TAHC is trying to rush through rules and penalties, Rep. Bryan Hughes expressed his concerns for the proposed program. In a letter to Richard C. Traylor, Chairman of the TAHC, Rep. Hughes said he intends to offer legislation amending the stature and providing exemptions for small producers. See Story: Rep Hughes shares concerns on Animal Identification Proposal.
The greatest vocal opposition to the proposed plan to date seems to be from Texas horse owners who view the “registration of facilities” and the “tagging of animals” as just another wasteful taxing scheme.
At the last commission meeting, action on the proposed plan was postponed. At least two commission members expressed concerns about the value of the proposed plan. The next meeting to review the plan was set for May, but without warning the TAHC announced on March 1 that it was setting the early morning meeting for March 23. (Carla Everett, information officer for the commission most likely knows the March editions of Texas horse papers and magazines have already been published.)
The TAHC has been directed by the Legislature to develop and implement (HB 1361) a plan for animal identification that would follow the guidelines of a national plan. But the possible adoption of a national plan appears uncertain until 2008 or after.
So horse owners are asking, “Why the rush to implement a program in Texas?”
If the Texas plan is supposed to follow the guidelines of a national plan, and there isn’t a national plan, shouldn’t the commission wait until there are guidelines to follow, horse owners question?
A national animal identification plan is supposed to help health care agencies
be able to trace and track any kind of disease outbreak among flocks or herds
of animals. The “crisis” which triggered the initiation of such
a plan was the discovery of a single dairy cow with BSE mad cow disease. No
new cases of BSE have been reported.
If a national plan is implemented, and horses are included, then the government
will have a system in place to track a horse throughout its life, tax horse
owners, create new and bigger government agencies at greater costs to taxpayers
and regulate the movement of horses while putting the “out-of-pocket”
expenses of identifying each horse directly on the horse owner.
The National Animal Identification System and the TAHC are trying to include horses, but the reasoning appears contrived. The TAHC has put out a paper trying to explain why horses should be included. The thrust of the paper is that there are diseases which could be transmitted from horses to humans—but that has nothing to do with tracing and tracking an outbreak of a disease among herds. In addition the cases cited are extremely weak. For example, anthrax which could affect a human if the human became infected from the tissues of an affect horse, is listed. But no substantiation or report of such cases is offered. And if it were the case, again, the Animal Identification plan could not and would not prevent it.
Another far-fetched example cited is Borna Disease…”a large number (no number is given) of horses died from an epidemic in 1885”...since then there doesn’t seem to be any cases to report. Again, an identification program could not and would not stop the disease.
Proponents claim the plan would “protect equine heath”, but don’t say how; and reduce the number of disease outbreaks, but don’t say how.
And the proponents don’t take into account that a very large percentage of horses in the US are now registered with associations. That means they have a number, markings, and in some cases DNA samples…if identification will stop disease, why hasn’t it been stopped among registered horses, horse owners ask?
Finally, there hasn’t been an outbreak of disease among horses that
hasn’t been adequately controlled under the present system.