Daily Yonder
Speak Your Piece: Tag EVERY Animal?
Sharon Zecchinelli's hogs, Pork and Chop, would have to be individually tagged.
Photo:Vince Zecchinelli
As my friends and I rode our horses the other day in the Cold Hollow Mountains of Vermont, I tried to savor the moment. Besides hearing the grunt of a moose, whose retreating tracks we saw on the ride back down the mountain trail, there was sign of a big deer alongside a set of canine tracks. I made note of the place where some partridges rose up out of the bush. Here and there fall colors were beginning to appear in the sugar bush.
I sighed, as I always do, thinking about how these days of having the freedom and liberty to own and ride horses with friends could be slipping away due to the National Animal Identification System (NAIS).
NAIS is a mandate – not a law – dreamt up by various federal acronyms: the USDA (United Stated Department of Agriculture); the APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services); and the NIAA (National Institute for Animal Agriculture). The idea of NAIS is to supposedly trace back disease in the “national herd” within 48 hours of its discovery.
Read the rest of it here.
An ear tag for every chicken, I say. And just let those government bureaucrats try to find my chickens' ears! That's the entire problem with NAIS--the people who are writing the laws know absolutely NOTHING about agriculture. NAIS is supported by everyone EXCEPT farmers and animal owners. Personally, I think that it will be something they try to do, but it will be such a colossal cluster f&*k and there will be such an outcry that it will fall by the wayside.
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