The Rural Voice, 2004-02, Page 18Offering Tong -term hope
A superior cattle identification sgstem mag be the wag for Canadian
beef producers to get their revenge but what will the industrg look like
bg the time the sgstem is ready?
By Keith Roulston
Will Canada's cattle industry.-*
Piave to shrink? Much will
depend on U.S: politics.
T
he best thing that can come out
of the BSE crisis for those
Canadian producers who can
survive it, will be an improved
tracking system spurred on by the
current difficulties.
"The one way we can get payback
on those competitors who have
treated us badly is to get ahead of
them," said Charlie Gracey of the
Canadian Livestock Identification
Agency when he spoke to the beef
day at Grey -Bruce Farmers Week in
Elmwood, January 9. That's why
programs like the identification
program are so important, he said.
Gracey acknowledged compulsory
tagging hasn't been "the most wildly
popular" program in the cattle
industry but it proved its worth in the
BSE crisis through the ability to trace
cattle associated with the lone case of
14 THE RURAL VOICE
BSE in Alberta. "Without
identification we'd have had a lot
more problems."
Compare the results with the U.S.,
he said. In Alberta they were able to
go into a pen of 300 cattle and
identify two that had been associated
with the original case. Those two
plus one animal that had lost its tag
had to be destroyed. In the U.S. in
early January, a whole pen of 400
cattle had to be destroyed because
there were animals in it that had been
connected to the U.S. case of BSE in
Washington State, but there was no
way of identifying which animals
they were.
After the disclosure of that case
and the revelation that the dairy cow
might have originated in Alberta,
"we had all the information ready (on
the animal) before CFIA (Canadian
Food Inspection Agency) asked for
it," Gracey said.
It's exactly that kind of food
safety and animal health emergency
that was envisioned, Gracey said,
when beef industry leaders decided a
cattle identification program was
needed after the outbreak of foot and
mouth disease in Britain. And though
the program has already proved its
worth, the goal is to make it better.
"The minute of the BSE outbreak
(last May 20) we also looked at how
we needed to improve," he said.
When tagging became mandatory
on July 1, 2002, there was an
immediate 90 per cent compliance,
he said. But there had been several
concessions to make the program
more palatable such as an exemption
for cattle temporarily leaving home
but returning again, such as going to