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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