Government scraps animal ID system; McCaskill applauds
02.07.2010
 
By Bill Lambrecht
Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — For much of the past decade, the Agriculture Department has pursued, often clumsily, a national identification system to track livestock from birth to slaughter.
The effort came about in 2003 after a case of mad cow disease was traced to an imported animal. Mad cow disease, better known as BSE, is brain malady that can afflict humans. It is a potentially serious problem that ravaged the livestock industry in Europe and bred deep distrust in government there. The prospect of extra record-keeping sounded especially onerous in Missouri,  the nation’s second leading state in beef cow-calf operations. What’s more, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Agriculture Department had spent more than $130 million without coming up with a workable system.  Since 2006, the government has tried a voluntary system. But it didn’t work well either: By last year, just over a third of the nation’s livestock sites had signed up.  Things changed today.  Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced in a speech in Washington today that the government is taking a new approach and will start over.
“It is apparent that a new strategy for animal-disease traceability is needed,” he said.  The announcement went over so well with Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., that she was twittering about it this afternoon. Last year, she wrote Vilsack arguing that the trouble and expense of the system wasn’t worth the effort, especially in an economic downturn already had stretched livestock producers “beyond the breaking point.  “Today’s announcement is a victory for Missouri’s small producers,” she said a short time ago in a release.
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/political-fix/political-fix/2010/02/government-scraps-animal-id-system-mccaskill-applauds/