The Truth About the Animal ID Plan
(Page 2 of 7)
June/July 2007
By Jack Kittredge
The animal ID program, however, is a one-size-fits-all program targeting many species of animals. It’s difficult to see how it can be useful against any specific disease. Among poultry, avian influenza is the most obvious disease threat. Yet it spreads so rapidly in confinement chicken facilities that an entire building — hundreds of thousands of birds — can be infected quickly, and it requires a much shorter response time than 48 hours. In the case of a disease with a long incubation period, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka mad cow disease), animal tracking may identify cows that shared the same location years ago. But control of the disease requires culling affected animals, and the only way to determine if an animal is affected is a lab test of brain tissue after death. It would be far easier and cheaper to simply test every cow upon slaughter, before releasing the beef into the food supply.
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Mandatory livestock ID would do nothing to help control food-borne diseases. Cases of E. coli contamination, for instance, are associated with poor sanitation at processing plants, after the animal is dead and its identification is moot.
WHO’S BEHIND ANIMAL ID?
If the program does not serve the goals of disease prevention or control, then why is the USDA proposing it? To answer that, critics have looked to where the program originated, and whom it benefits.
According to the draft plan, in 2002 the National Institute of Animal Agriculture (NIAA) initiated meetings that led to the development of the ID plan. The NIAA, it turns out, is a private organization whose membership reads like a who’s who of agribusiness: Cargill, Monsanto, the National Livestock Producers Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the National Renderers Association, and veterinary medicine companies such as Pfizer and Schering Plough.
Manufacturers of animal ID and tracking systems, such as Cattle-Traq and Digital Angel, also are members. Their interests in such a program are pretty clear. No one knows exactly how many animals would be affected by mandatory animal ID, but starting with the nation’s 63 million hogs, 97 million cows, 300 million laying hens and 9 billion chickens for meat, the market is vast.
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