Animal ID

If you have paid any attention to me at all, you know I don't support the governments <acronym title="National Animal Identification System">NAIS</acronym> efforts. We don't need the government mandating yet another expensive program that us producers can't afford to implement for them.<br />n<br />nYesterday I worked my replacement heifers, heifer calves that I am keeping to make cows out of, and as part of the process I had a veterinarian on hand to bangs (Brucellosis) vaccinate them. Now Bangs vaccination requires a vet to do it. He tattoos the animals ear with his tattoo identifying he done it and then puts a metal tag in their ear with a unique identification number along with giving them their vaccination of course.<br />n<br />nI asked the vet why the unique id number on the bangs tag couldn't be used as part of the <acronym title="National Animal Identification System">NAIS</acronym> system. It is a unique number that is sent into the government identifying an animal to a person and I have personally seen it used to track a critter as mine in less than 24 hours. He informed me that technically it should work just as well if not better than the proposed <acronym title="National Animal Identification System">NAIS</acronym> if the government just handled the paperwork right. According to him to many states do not file the paperwork right, a lot of it finds file 13, so that it is not useful for tracking purposes.<br />n<br />nSo, instead of throwing a lot of money away devising a new system, why can't we throw some of it at the existing Bangs system to fix the paperwork problems on the government level to track breeding age cows through the US? One of the main reasons behind <acronym title="National Animal Identification System">NAIS</acronym> is <acronym title="Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy">BSE</acronym>. Since this disease is not transfered from cow to cow and only occurs in older cattle, usually breeding stock, wouldn't it make since to fix the broken system instead of reinventing the wheel?<br />n<br />nTypical government inefficiency. Don't fix the broken, just make a new bureaucracy. <br />n<br />n<strong>Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us. P. J. O'Rourke</strong><br />n<br />nCross-posted to <a href="http://noanimalid.com">No Mandatory Animal ID</a><br />