Big Brother is watching ... the childrens' pig?

Star-Telegram | March 6, 2006
By J.R. Labbe

Howard Garrett isn't just passionate about organic gardening and how to rid Texas yards of the fire ant scourge.

The Dirt Doctor of radio fame (WBAP/820 AM) is hopping mad about a federal animal registration program he calls a "bureaucratic boondoggle" that's an "insane invasion of private property."

Under the guise of public health and national security -- what new federal program isn't couched this way these days? -- the U.S. Department of Agriculture has initiated the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The program applies to anyone who owns or handles food animals and livestock, veterinarians included.

Any property owner who has livestock is being encouraged -- for now it's just an invitation, but by January 2008 it could be mandatory unless the program is derailed -- to register the physical location with the government and to electronically tag the on-site animals so their movements can be tracked through global positioning satellites.

Once in place, NAIS is supposed to help keep terrorists from contaminating or infecting the country's food stocks with very bad things and help the nation curtail the spread of nastiness such as avian flu or mad cow disease.

If this program were solely about corporate agri-businesses that produce tons of pork loin, ground beef and hot wings headed for America's kitchens, perhaps national security and public health concerns make sense. In fact, big commercial hog, chicken and cattle operators are in favor of this program because they think it will improve their export business by calming the fears of those pesky Japanese and Europeans who worry about bad U.S. meat.

The big guys, of course, will pass the costs of implementing such a program onto their consumers. But anyone who raises a couple of chickens in the backyard for the eggs or has a family cow for the milk it provides -- yes, they would have to register their premises and tag the animals -- would have to absorb the program costs themselves.

The ID system's price tag is troublesome enough, but the very idea that the comings and goings of someone's pet pig will be monitored should stagger every red-blooded American who believes in personal privacy and freedom.

"4-H students would have to leave a paper trail of the movement of their animals," Garrett told the audience at the Feb. 24 Rotary Club of Fort Worth meeting. "If you own a horse and take it out for a ride, it will be tracked."

It's beyond me how forcing a family to register their three acres in Johnson County and to tag the kids' horse and the couple of goats that they keep on the back-40 will protect the food chain.

Mary Zanoni, the executive director of Farm for Life, doesn't get it either. Zanoni, a lawyer, filed official comments that decried the lunacy of the registration standards with the USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service.

"Indeed, the only general systems of permanent registration of personal property in the United States are systems administered by the individual states for two items that are highly dangerous if misused: motor vehicles and guns," Zanoni wrote. "It is difficult to imagine any acceptable basis for the Department to subject the owner of a chicken to more intrusive surveillance than the owner of a gun.

"For example, whereas the owner of a long gun generally can take the gun and go hunting beyond the confines of his or her own property without notifying the government, the Department proposes that the chicken owner, under pain of unspecified 'enforcement,' must report within 24 hours any instance of a chicken leaving or returning to the registered property."

I'd never heard of NAIS before Garrett was a guest speaker at my Rotary Club. While researching NAIS, I discovered that many states -- including Texas -- have started to implement their own versions of the program.

I'm pleased to report that it's not going well in the Lone Star State. So much dust was raised by angry landowners at a Feb. 16 public hearing on the Texas Premise ID plan that the Texas Animal Health Commission voted to postpone taking action that would have made premise registration mandatory as of July 1.

"Hearing complaints ranging from privacy invasion to infringement of certain religious practices, state animal health officials opted to delay ruling on the proposed premise identification plan pending further review," said a Texas Farm Bureau report from the meeting.

This doesn't mean that the program, which would have assessed landowners a $10 annual fee to register the types of animals kept on their property, will be abandoned. It will come up again unless Texans who love their freedom call, write and generally berate the state lawmakers who crafted the enabling legislation that made this possible.

While you have your computer fired up to write that e-mail to a state lawmaker, fire off another one to your congressional representative. When Congress passed the Animal Health Protection Act as part of the 2002 farm bill, federal lawmakers gave the USDA the authority to develop a national ID system. Surely placing a chip into Flicka was not what they had in mind.

Be very clear on one thing: The average citizen is not crying for this bloated bureaucracy on a state or national level. It is the brainchild of big agribusiness that will make additional dollars off of a governmental mandate and the high-tech companies with the government contracts to produce the various software and ID systems needed to make this program work.

Last modified March 6, 2006