(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({ google_ad_client: "ca-pub-1163816206856645", enable_page_level_ads: true }); Northview Diary: National Animal ID tags get lost in Britain

Friday, November 28, 2008

National Animal ID tags get lost in Britain

A number of farmer bloggers have long said that ear tags are a lousy way to permanently identify cattle. If you have cows and use tags, it is simply obvious that they get lost. Often. Sometimes in our yearling pens only one or two will still have tags even though they are all tagged as babies.


In Great Britain where animal ID rules are so stringent as to be absurd, that exact conclusion is coming to the fore.




This is still not good enough for authorities there who fined a farmer for having cows leave the farm with two tags and get off the truck with one.
And they were really, really ticked off when he won his court appeal.




I hope farmers here in the USA continue to fight national ID as hard as they can. The cost if the program is implemented is going to be staggering



Um, gee, that tagging thing really worked out good didn't it....at least for the ear tag companies.


And here is another good article on the cow tax....wherein you can see that this suddenly became a hot button issue because our new president elect is solidly on board with the big bucks for carbon trading, global warming bunch. He is threatening Congress with EPA action on this matter and using farming as a bargaining chip.


Here is what the Cattle Site had to say about emissions from dairy cows.


Here is something else that really ticked me off at the time (and is making me even less happy now). Our Dairy Check Off dollars (to the tune of six million of them) were pledged by our trusty leadership to fund an EPA study of emissions on dairy farms. We are forced to pay the check off out of our milk checks before we even see our money. It is supposed to be spent to promote dairy products, which is an admirable goal. It was NEVER INTENDED to be handed to a government agency to help them find a stick to beat us with.



8 comments:

Linda said...

I sure hope you keep fighting NAIS too. As far as we can tell (from a producers standpoint) our CAIS has given us nothing but grief. Common sense has left the government if there ever was such a thing there.

Jinglebob said...

Grrrrrrr!Don't get me started !!!!!

threecollie said...

LInda, it is being implemented in an insidious manner....people signed up against their will, kids being forced to get their parents to sign up to show their 4-H animals. It hasn't worked well anywhere it has been done and we don't even need it here. They can trace cows just fine already and do!

JB, frustrating isn't it!

Melissa Hart said...

We have manditory ID here in Michigan because of the TB issue. any thing that leaves the farm has to have an RFID tag in it. We used picture ID for our registration papers and then decided it may be easier to use Holstein ID tags.....that was great until half the heifers look like we notched their ears like pigs because the tags kept ripping out. I"m back to using sketches or pictures...I contend, you can change eartags over and over and over again, but you can't change their spots!

Throwback at Trapper Creek said...

Just think if you got the gummint contract to provide the tags. Pretty sweet deal, everyone knows how long the ear tags actually stay in.

Our neighbors are pressuring us to sign up early. HA!

threecollie said...

Melissa, Alan and I tagged a calf yesterday so we could put her in a pen...just our own tags as that is all that is required here so far. I suspect she will soon lose it and we too will rely on the registration photo...not that we have so many we won't recognize her anyhow...lol

Nita, it has been about money and being able to wipe out entire regions of animals if foot and mouth shows up, right from the beginning. Makes me so mad!
Your neighbors are nuts! Sorry, but they just are!

Ericka said...

please pardon my utter ignorance, but can't you brand them? or tattoo or them?

threecollie said...

Ericka, you can indeed do either or both of those things and they are time honored id solutions that work. However the government wants rfid tags, electronic tags that can be read from a distance by a reader. They don't stay in any better than the bangle tags we use in our operation for easy recognition of the cows. Ours fall out all the time, but in such a small herd we know them anyhow. I think branding or something similar would be a much more effective system.