Animal ID Won't Be Mandatory
US - Farmers and ranchers won't be forced to register their cows, pigs and chickens in a nationwide database aimed at helping track the outbreak of disease, the Bush administration said Wednesday.
22 November 2006
1 minute read
``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.
First promised in response to the discovery of mad cow disease 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 mad cow disease in 2003.
Source: guardian.co.uk
