Posted on 12/18/2007 6:35:59 AM PST by davidgumpert
NAIS, which the US Department of Agriculture has been rolling out in concert with many states since 2003, is stunning in its projected scope. Over the next few years each of the nation's 1.4 million farms (plus thousands of veterinary facilities, export/import stations, livestock barns and genetic facilities) will be affected, with all their approximately 95 million cattle, 1.8 billion chickens, 60 million pigs, 93 million turkeys, 6.3 million sheep, 2.5 million goats and every other livestock species, including bison, camelids, cervids, horses and llamas. In all, more than twenty-nine species and more than two billion animals are slated to be fitted with the ID tags or be injected with transponders that transmit, to a national network of databases, information as basic as date of birth and as sophisticated as DNA profiles and chemical-residue measurements in the bloodstream.
NAIS, ostensibly intended to contain disease outbreaks among livestock, has sparked the most severe political backlash rural America has seen in decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
Next humans.
I’ll be the first to say it: But we can’t track illegal aliens.
Also includes 4H kids with a single animal for a project. They have to pay usually high fees to license the animal - pricing many out of this sort of project.
PS No I don’t want to see it used on humans, but I wish the government’s priorities were a little different.
bump
ping
That USDA took significant notice of what happened in Europe with both mad cow and hoof & mouth disease and doesn’t want to see the meat industry COLLAPSE from such a catastrophe.
It CAN happen here.
We can identify a calf in a Canadien/Canadian feed lot but not an illegal in demonstration. WTG!
This creates more massive bureaucracy with its potential for abuse and mismanagement.
If they try to enforce it, it’s going to be a mess. A total mess.
And other posters are right, they can’t even track students who come here and overstay their visas.
There is no size limit? Lots of our food is produced by adults who were 4H, if this program whacks 4H it will have repercussions.
Its about money, power, tax collection and control. There is no better way to track & control the food supply.
Yes, an outbreak can happen here. How hard would it be for some Earth First activists to get some hoof & mouth disease on their hands and then tour county fairs or livestock auctions for a few weeks? How would NAIS prevent this?
I think the biggest thing here is that this lets them vastly enlarge a secure government jobs program for liberals; a million more clerks and inspectors and managers, all drawing government paychecks and voting Democrat.
As for doing any good, the costs will vastly outweigh any benefits.
I have hobby farmed off and on over the years. Chickens running around loose have often presented me with a surprise batch of babies. There were always 20 or 30 half grown ones running around the farm lots and sheds all summer. They are good for cleaning up spilled grain from hog and cattle feeding and a few chickens running loose on a farm can help keep rat and mice levels down.
Now it looks like I could be fined if I don’t catch, number and report each one.
Sometimes predators, a hawk or fox, skunk or weasel, would snatch one and I would never even know it happened, yet I am supposed to report each death?
A coyote hauls off a young lamb in a flock of hundreds and I am supposed to know about it and report it? Farm animals, especially young ones, disappear all the time and often farmers have only a vague idea when and only a guess at what happened to them.
A small loss of livestock is normal and just part of farming.
Keeping single animal registration of every animal on a farm of commercial grade livestock is preposterous and absolutely unmanageable.
High value pedigreed stock or a prize horse or hobby lama would be different, but commercial grade hogs and sheep and chickens? Forget it.
Tracking and segregation.
A lot of un-infected livestock was destroyed throughout Europe because they just weren’t sure where each animal had been.
I agree with concerns about the government’s desire for power and taxes, but we really need a system that will mitigage losses.
Thus the inclusion of pigs and sheep.
I guess that they want to compete with TSA. That is, instead of an intelligent, profiling approach to identifying potential terrorists (e.g. like the approach by Israel), the TSA assumes that your 87 year old grandmother COULD be a terrorist and subject her to a body cavity search for acting suspicious, and avoids accosting an Imam because we do not want to be accused of profiling, or something like that.
In a similar manner the USDA wants to tag a few billion animals, because, after all, any one of them could be the carrier. Perhaps we should talk to Israel or another sane country (if there is one) about how to approach the problem in a less time consuming, directed manner. The resources required to tag and maintain such an enormous data base would be monumental, not to mention the loss of privacy and demands on individual citizens. It would be ineffective, with more resources being spent to diagnose and “fix the systemic problems.” This would be great for contractors or for building another giant bureaucracy.
AGREED.
Horrid advancement toward SLAGGING HUMANS
SLAve taGGING humans with the computer ID chip
as Scripture predicted for our era 2,000 years ago.
I got a letter from those jerks, threw in the trash.
Yes, but that is not what this is about. This is about control over the smaller farms. The large feed lots do not have to track each animal, but each individual does.
Even if that animal is only for personal consumption and never leaves your property.
Once they get NAIS implemented they will be setting up a system through satellites to track crops in fields. They are already doing growth surveys for invasive weeds and certain fungi in hay all in the name of “protecting” our food supply.
Interesting what got stuck in the Patriot Act.
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