MARK WAITE / PVT An angry member of the audience confronts Dr. David Thain, veterinarian for the state extension service, during a seminar at the University of Nevada, Reno Cooperative Extension Service in Pahrump Monday night. Advertisement

Dr. David Thain, veterinarian for the University of Nevada-Reno College of Agriculture, used the word "voluntary" 11 times during a recent talk about the National Animal Identification System with animal owners here.

But the 16 animal owners attending a seminar at the University of Nevada, Reno, Cooperative Extension Service here Monday night were still highly suspicious of the program to register animals and animal premises.

Talk of putting microchips in animals sounded positively Orwellian to them.

The meeting was convened to try to address several myths about the project, Thain said. One of the people in attendance was Yvonne Smith, who circulated petitions at feed stores around the state against the proposal.

The main concern of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in proposing the program is to track animals spreading diseases, with cattle being the major concern.

Thain said the only states that aren't free of bovine brucellosis are Texas and Idaho, with a small brucellosis outbreak in the greater Yellowstone area among elk and bison.

Nevada has mandatory branding to track livestock, but many eastern states don't, he said.

"This program is voluntary and it's always been advertised as voluntary. There's been no push by industry or industry groups to move beyond that at this point in time and so it is voluntary, completely voluntary," Thain said. "There are no fines for producers for not registering in the NAIS system either their animals or their premises."

Thain recalled the outbreak of Newcastle disease in backyard poultry in the Las Vegas Valley in 2003.

"Even now that we've done that, we've experienced that backyard poultry, there's no plans whatsoever to try to identify every little backyard operation that has a handful of lambs, hens, ducks. The big one is to try to identify commercial operations, ones that commercially enter the market place."

Thain said there aren't highly contagious diseases with horses, like foot and mouth disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease.

"One of the big things that came up is where are we going to capture these movements? Are we going to talk about having the producer call in when they move cattle down the street or down the road a half a mile? The western state veterinarians as a whole don't think that is important. Where we would like to collect that data is where we have a commercial change of ownership, where we're moving through livestock markets, where we're moving across state lines," Thain said.

While the current U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has made it perfectly clear it would be a voluntary program, Thain said, "With the change in administration that's going to happen in two years, one never knows where the politics is going to go."

The first case of mad cow disease in Washington state was tracked through a tag to a herd in Canada, Thain said. But BSE isn't the biggest fear, he said.

"Probably the big one that has us scared, and has had us scared for years, is foot and mouth disease, because it's so highly contagious, probably the most contagious virus known to man," he said. "When those animals move, trying to find out who those animals have been around during incubation period would be really, really tough, and that's why kind of the long-term goal is to move this into an electronic format where it's easy to pick up."

The USDA would use RFID microchips, which relay information to a national animal record repository and national premises repository, Thain said. But he predicted it could be 10 to 15 years before the relay system is working right. Besides health concerns, Thain said the system could be used by producers for management decisions: How did the animal perform at feed lots? When she was sold as a pregnant heifer, did she have a calf every year? Did the calf do well?

Large companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's restaurants made a commitment to buy some of their meat from sources that can verify age and origin, Thain said. The tracking system is very much driving the Pacific Rim cattle market in countries like Japan and Korea, he said.

"Animal ID helps a lot because that is what the Japanese are demanding. They want proof that this animal is less than 20 months of age, where it has been over its lifetime," Thain said.

Federal veterinarians were working on a better response plan after the mad cow outbreak in Great Britain when the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, also brought fears of a bio-terrorist attack, he said.

The fear involving sheep is scabies, where there is also a long-term eradication plan, Thain said.

While he stressed the voluntary nature of the program, Thain said the USDA would like to have 25 percent of the premises registered under the National Animal Identification System by Jan. 1; after the premises are identified, the identification of animals would be next. By 2009, the goal is for 100 percent of newborn livestock to be identified and 60 percent of all animals, Thain said.

But Smith, the petition organizer wondered: "I slaughter animals at home. Why should I be part of that group?"

Thain said it would be good for tracking a horse that's stolen, for one thing.

"We've got little goats and my kids show their goats for 4-H and I've been to a handful of goat shows. Half of them are micro-chipped, half of them are tattooed. Out of the half that are micro-chipped, I'd say one out of three or one out of five microchips failed," said Dawn Scronce, a Pahrump 4-H leader. "If Nevada already has a branding system, if Nevada already has laws in place regarding branding of animals, why put this at our expense?"

Thain said if sheep come up with scrabies the system could help to identify where the animals came from.

Kay Landwehr, of Dry Land Goat Company, angrily retorted, "You need to work on things that are a little more practical instead of things that are taking away my constitutional rights."

Landwehr, who pointed out she's Jewish, even compared the system to the method of tattooing concentration camp victims during World War II.

Scronce said, "What I hear and what I have read on the USDA's Web site is any movement of those animals has to be recorded. Now if that is the case, then I have 20 market animals this year. Every time those kids leave their premises to weigh their animals at their local 4-H farm, they've got to call and report it within 24 hours."

Thain said the 4-H kids wouldn't have to do that. But he said, "the USDA is like a barrel of monkeys: one weasel doesn't know what the other weasel is doing."

As long as the animals are kept inside the state, the federal government won't bother them, he said.

But Scronce added in one case, a friend shipping a couple of goats with a health certificate was given a premises identification number under the National Animal Identification System.

"It was concidental," Thain said, concluding it could have been because of the scrabies tag.

"Why was this woman assigned a premise number because she had a scrabies test?" Landwehr asked.

A man who didn't want to be identified, asked, "When are they going to start (micro) chipping dogs and cats, domestic animals?"

He then shouted at Thain, "I don't believe anything you're saying."

Smith said later the USDA states on its Web site the identification system will be mandatory by 2008.

"I still don't think this is the way to go for us small-time producers," Smith said. She said a few people will gather at her home and slaughter their animals and never enter the market.

Smith demonstrated the stack of petitions she already received opposing the NAIS plan is already an inch thick. She is still collecting petitions from some locations.

More information may be obtained on the USDA website at www.usda.gov/nais. The USDA may also be reached at 4700 River Road, Unit 43, Riverdale, MD, 20737-1231. The telephone number is 301-734-0799.