Canada exports at-risk cattle

Hundreds of cattle from Canada, which this month confirmed its ninth case of mad cow disease, have entered the United States without government-required health papers or identification tags, according to documents obtained by cattlemen in Eastern Washington.

The documents, consisting largely of correspondence between state officials and American cattle and meat companies, suggest problems with numerous truckloads of cattle that are shipped into the country almost daily. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently launched an investigation into the Canadian cattle trade based on the documents, according to a top department official.

Many of the documents note that cattle arrived in the U.S. without identification tags, or they had tag numbers that did not match the accompanying health certificates. Overall, the approximately 700 pages of records suggest that officials from Washington and possibly other states are having difficulty tracking hundreds of cattle that arrive from Canada each week.

Ranchers and food safety groups criticize the USDA, saying it has insufficiently monitored the movement of cattle into the U.S. Lax regulation of the border trade, these critics say, could lead to more mad cow cases in the U.S., undermining consumer confidence in beef.

Mad cow, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is a neurological disease that attacks a cow’s central nervous system. It is believed that humans can contract variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a disorder that eats away at the brain, by consuming meat from BSE-infected cattle.

Ear tags or electronic identification – EID – tags that are supposed to be on cattle entering the U.S. from Canada are meant to track the cattle in case of an outbreak of disease or other problem. Health certificates confirm the health of cattle and also that they are under 30 months old, because young cattle are not thought to be fully vulnerable to mad cow.

Together, the tags and health papers provide the major protection against sick cows coming into the country. The USDA is supposed to work with Canadian agriculture officials to ensure that all incoming cattle have these safeguards.

But the documents obtained by the ranchers show that this often is not the case.

In a memo dated March 7, 2006, representatives of one American cattle operation wrote, “52 head of the 60 came in NO EID. The papers have a mixture of EID & bar codes for official tags. We recorded the bar codes (although a couple came in with no tags at all) and gave them our EID tag.”

Numerous state documents listing each truckload of cattle – about 40 to 65 head of cattle are on each truck – include the notation “tag not matched” next to the individual truckload number.

“We had a load come in with the wrong health papers all together,” stated an e-mail dated April 6 to the state from a cattle firm. “It was never caught at the border.” The correct health papers for that load of 66 cattle, the e-mail’s author noted, were later obtained from officials at the U.S.-Canadian border.

In a statement, the Washington state Veterinarian’s Office said it works with the USDA “to reconcile the ear tags on cattle with Canadian brands with the information on the USDA documents.”

The Veterinarian’s Office is giving more scrutiny than ever to the movement of imported cattle, the statement said.

“Some of the animal identification numbers on the USDA importation documents were transposed or did not match the ear tag, and some animals lost ear tags in transit. These kinds of things can and do occur in the commerce of animals,” the statement said.

The Cattle Producers of Washington, the organization that obtained the documents under Washington state’s Public Disclosure Act, is a group of ranchers and cattle brokers many of whose members live in Eastern Washingon, where the first U.S. case of mad cow disease was discovered in December 2003.

That dairy cow, found in Mabton, Wash., had been imported from Canada, which had discovered its own mad cow four months earlier.

After the 2003 mad cow discoveries, the USDA halted the shipment of Canadian cattle and beef products into the United States. But in 2005, the USDA began to allow shipments of cattle younger than 30 months.

The cattle producers said they sought the records to determine whether the state and federal governments were enforcing regulations that govern Canadian imports.

They are concerned about the impact of lower-priced Canadian imports on their own businesses, as well as the potential spread of disease from Canadian cattle that don’t have proper medical papers.

The ranchers said they are worried about foot-and-mouth disease as well as mad cow. “Mad cow doesn’t spread cow-to-cow,” noted Willard Wolf, a cattle broker from Spokane who is vice president of the Cattle Producers of Washington. “Foot-and-mouth does, and it could affect a whole herd.”