Recently, I was alerted to a new thing going on in America. I'm not sure about other countries, but the government is forcing anyone that has livestock that sells it to the public to have the animal coded for tracking. This way they can track and control diseases such as mad cow disease.
This is particularly interesting to me because I'm curious about how the technology works. Does anyone know? Can you link me to a few articles if you come across it?
I also think that if it work, it is brilliant. Everyone is scared of Mad Cow disease. I've heard through some reliable sources (vet students at the school) that this disease is barely transmittable to humans if one follows common sense and cooks the meat correctly and avoid eating any of the nervous system. (No brains! We are not zombies!) Even if this is true, as many students can be mistaken from time to time from what they hear in classes, I still think this is a great psychological trick for those that don't look into all the facts. I know too many people jump to conclusions without knowing the full story.
It also infuriates me. It infuriates me because of a lack of consideration for the Amish. They have a religious belief against marking anything with numbers. They believe it is the marking's of Satan. I respect that, even if I don't believe it. Recently, I noted that all the Amish are liquidating their stock because they adhere to their religious beliefs. I applaud them for that, but I also worry about their ability to keep all the income they need to survive in a non-bartering society.
I talked to an Amish man down at the Farmer's Market today about it. He told me that they are allowed to keep meat for their families, and I suspect that they can also share it with the community. They fear that soon they government won't even let them do that. They fear that the government will not let them raise meat that they themselves, butcher, cook and eat. I can understand that. I would fear it to, if I was in their place.
So, I'm asking myself, where does the protection of the people end, and religious intolerance begin? When are we going to loose our freedom of choice? I can see both sides of the story, albeit not clearly. I'm still concerned as I have to live in a society where the government won't allow for a sign to be put up clearly stating something that will allow people to choose. I go to the store and choose between organic or inorganic. I choose between non-fat and fat loaded goodies. Why can't I or anyone else choose between a coded or non-coded cow?
Not EVERYONE is afraid of Mad Cow Disease. Sorry about that. Got carried away with my thoughts and didn't really consider it until now.
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You can't ignore me, for I'll not lie down quietly.
http://insanitek.net
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I understood what you meant even though in the back of my mind I was like 'I am not afraid'... In general though it is a conscern, or it had been, for many people for a while.
Good catch
Love is like a box of chocolates; if you chose wisely you won’t be disappointed and have to spit it out. ~T
A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins. ~Benjamin Franklin
I love your quotes. I'm yoinking the second one to put on my website as inspiration.
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You can't ignore me, for I'll not lie down quietly.
http://insanitek.net
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I think that in the end the Amish will be allowed an exception to the law so long as their animals are kept from those that are chipped. I doubt that it would be a problem for them to live with that rule. I am not 100% sure that I am right about this, but I think that Mad Cow Disease is preventable. I remember a talking to a cousin of mine that lived in South America for a little more than a decade, cattle was THE biggest industry in the country. Uruguay is a small and little heard of, but they have greet beef and leather goods.
So while we were catching up he mentioned that Uruguay had actually banned any meat from the USA for a couple of years because of the Mad Cow Outbreaks. Even after the outbreaks were contained most ranchers wanted the bann to continue though, not because the have any problem with americans. They said that it was only because we feed ground up sheep parts to the cattle to supplement their diet that they are even suseptible to this Mad Cow Disease. Something about protien strains in the meat can trigger an outbreak.
So the Amish, and many countries like Uruguay, who do not feed their vegetarian cattle anything but grains and plant byproducts, probably would avoid most outbreaks of Mad Cow without an elaborate tracking system.
However, this tracking system will also make it possible to track cattle breed from cloned animals. That is a new and very controversial idea being practiced already by some ranchers here in the USA. They clone their prize winning bulls and cows in order to increase their breeding stock. So even though it won't end up on the butcher's block its descendents could already be there and we wouldn't even know we were eating it.
You bring up some really good points to consider and I will have to think about it more but I do Have one question. You said "... I have to live in a society where the government won't allow for a sign to be put up clearly stating something that will allow people to choose." and I do not really understand what you mean or what you are talking about here. The sign thing is foreign to me.
Love is like a box of chocolates; if you chose wisely you won’t be disappointed and have to spit it out. ~T
Well, I believe that people should be fully informed and make decisions for themselves. So, I would rather have people put a sign up that says, "This meat has not been tracked and is... " See, this is where I have to trail off because I'm not sure what good this does, really.
In the last days I've found out that Europe has this as well, and the purpose is to track where the animal came from, thus, if it is found to have Mad Cow, they know which other places to watch because they know where it is.
So, it is really a way to save money for those that would have to kill off animals, I think... I'm not sure of the details. I'm still looking!
All in all, I believe that people should be informed enough to make their own decisions. While I appreciate the effort that is being made my the governments to keep this disease down, I would really like to see a compromise with the people like the Amish that have a belief against it. The Amish should be allows to put a sign out saying that the meat is not tracked, so people can make the choice of whether or not to buy it and what to do with the said meat.
Granted, I also believe that a lot of people would overlook being educated, remain ignorant, then blame the Amish (or government and anything else they can sue) for their shortsightedness. Thus, I would also hope that the general public would be held accountable for their own actions.
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You can't ignore me, for I'll not lie down quietly.
http://insanitek.net
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It has been 2 decades since I have been involved in ranching but prior to that my family did it for five generations. We ran a large cow-calf operation which sometimes had upto 8000 mother cows but more typically ran at around 4500 mother cows.
These cattle got handled a fair amount and it would not have been that difficult to "chip them" at the Spring Roundup so that they could be tracked just like people "chip" their pets so that they can be recovered if lost. It is a simple enough procedure and would only add seconds to the roundup handling of calves which already included: branding, castration, multiple vaccinations, ear marking, growth steroid implants and dehorning. Shooting them with a chip injecting gun would have been a job for the left hand of whomever was running the vaccination gun in their right hand.
The technology of chipping is easy. You put some data on a chip that can be queried with a simple rf (radio) reader and inject the chip under the skin. I understand that in the Florida night club scene that some people are even having themselves chipped with their credit card info I guess to take the hassle out of paying for drinks and stuff. Personally I think that is nuts.
The main issue would be cost. The reason my family is no longer ranching is because it is a miserable business that is barely profitable. Occassional good years are accompanied by frequent bad years. Break-even comes to seem like a happy outcome.
If you are breaking even, or losing money on every animal you raise and sell then anything that adds to the cost is unwelcome. Having your pet chipped at the animal shelter typically costs about $25. I assume that on the scale we operated that we probably would have been able to chip our calves at a wholesale cost at maybe $5 to $10 each. Assuming a break-even scenario, a $10 additional cost per calf would have resulted in a $45,000 annual loss. We didn't need that.
One wonders if it is cost effective. How many cases of madcow have there been in the USA? Very very few. How many American have died from it? You can count them on one hand. The feeding practices that caused it have been banned for years so there may never be another case of mad cow. It was only found in older animals. Mostly beef cattle are sold young. Mainly the only older cattle that enter the food supply are aging dairy cattle so perhaps only they should be chipped and tracked. Bottom line is that I don't see why costs should he burdened on small farmers and ranchers that are mainly unjustified.
There are better ways to ensure the safety of the food supply and better ways to spend our limited supply of food safety dollars.. A good start would be "country of origin" labeling on meat and produce. I want to know where my spinach is coming from. As they say: "No caca en la espinaca".
Thank you, that was very informational!
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You can't ignore me, for I'll not lie down quietly.
http://insanitek.net
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