In meeting with citizens, whether animal owners or not, I hear the same recurring misinformed comments regarding the National Animal Identification System. Below are the three most common comments, along with the truth behind them.

NAIS is needed to protect our food supply. Most food-borne illnesses are from bacteria such as salmonella, e. coli, and campylobacter or a specific group of viruses called the Norwalk viruses. These organisms contaminate food through poor practices at slaughterhouses or in food handling. Since NAIS tracking ends at the time of slaughter, the program will not add to the government’s ability to trace contaminated meats once they are in the food chain. Enforcing better processing procedures is the answer to food-borne illness problems.

NAIS will control mad cow disease. First and foremost, mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE) is not a contagious disease. It isn’t even passed from cow to calf. Cattle get it by eating improper feed, making BSE uniquely, completely preventable. A 48-hour traceback of animal movements is not useful in preventing mad cow disease.

Besides, the USDA estimates that only four to seven cows in the entire United States have BSE and claims it’s not necessary to conduct testing to protect our food supply. The answers to preventing mad cow disease are proper feeding practices and, if a processor desires, testing for BSE.

NAIS will save us from avian flu. When a poultry flock is diagnosed with a disease, often the required remedy is destruction of the entire flock. Tagging individual birds therefore has no value. If birds are taken to a show and return with a communicable disease, their management depends on how that disease is spread. If it is a disease that quickly contaminates a flock, such as a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza, the whole flock will likely be slaughtered. If it is a disease for which individual testing is useful, individuals may be selected for slaughter. At that time, affected birds may be individually tagged or quarantined in separate pens. Controlling poultry diseases has many solutions.

A multi-million dollar NAIS program requiring you to register your premises, individually tag every chicken, and report the movements of each individual bird will not protect us from avian flu. Bird flu is most commonly spread through human intervention via either clothing or vehicles, vectors often found in confinement poultry operations that won’t be changed by tagging individual birds.

You might be interested to learn that a national system with a unique animal ID, unique national ID, premises ID, and computerized databases that all speak to each other, including pulling information from private databases, was designed by the architects of NAIS during the early 1990s—long before the mad cow and bird flu panics.

Karin Bergener of Ravenna, Ohio, is an attorney and co-founder of Liberty Ark Coalition. This article appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of Rural Heritage.