March 5, 2004

 

 

USDA Says Cattle Tagging Not Compulsory

 

A new identification program for U.S. livestock intended to quickly find animals suspected of having mad cow disease or other illnesses should not be mandatory, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official said on Thursday.

 

"It should be at first a voluntary program and go on to a mandatory program at a later date," USDA Undersecretary William Hawks told Congress. He did not define when that "later date" would be.

 

Democrats on a House of Representatives subcommittee questioned whether a voluntary program would adequately protect consumers from ingesting beef from cattle suspected of having mad cow disease. Hawks argued that the "marketplace should be the driving force" of any new program.

 

Legislation is pending in the U.S. House of Representatives that would give USDA $175 million to quickly launch a mandatory livestock identification program.

 

But Congress and USDA are still mulling the details, including the type of technology to be used in tracking the 95 million cattle, 60 million hogs and pigs, and tens of millions of chickens, turkeys and ducks in the United States.

 

There also are questions over whether the U.S. government should operate the program or whether it should be left up to industry, as it is in Canada.

 

The discovery of one case of mad cow disease in Washington state in December prompted USDA to speed up efforts to construct some type of animal identification system.

 

While U.S. investigators were able to trace the origin of the sick Holstein in Washington state to a farm in Alberta, Canada, they did not find all the other cattle slaughtered that day at the Washington state slaughterhouse nor all the cattle raised with the sick cow.

 

USDA announced steps at the end of December to keep meat from cattle with mad cow disease out of the food chain, but Democrats on the House panel that funds USDA programs were not satisfied.

 

"This system is full of holes," said Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat from New York, who unsuccessfully pressed Hawks and other USDA officials for details such as how many nonambulatory "downer" animals have been tested since the Dec. 23 discovery of mad cow disease. Those animals are thought to be at high-risk for the disease.