Yesterday morning I posted an ad to a sheep and goat listserve that I am on advertising my flock of Icelandic sheep for sale. Within about six hours of sending that message, I received a telephone call (went into voicemail) from a USDA bureaucrat stating that she had seen my ad, had looked my name up in their database, didn’t find me registered, and so was calling to inform me that all sheep and goat sold must have a scrapies ear tag affixed to them, and that they provide free ear tags, and that I should contact her so that I can be in “compliance.”
To be perfectly honest, the call was rather unsettling. I don’t like the idea that government bureaucrats are out there scouring cyberspace (and the local pennysaver, presumably?) looking for advertisements and then checking the database to see if the advertiser is in scrapies tag compliance. Relative to European livestock farmers, American livestock farmers still live in the wild west as it relates to regulations, especially tracking and information keeping, nevertheless, I am still quite unnerved by such a high level of government surveillance.
I suppose I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t think that the whole scrapies eradication nonesense is just a stupid hysterical reaction to the mad cow scare. Scrapies incidence before the eradication program was about 1%, hardly a contagious disease. Between 1947 and 2001, 1,600 total cases of scrapies in sheep were reported. The scrapies eradication program is nothing more than a perfect example of a hysterical government reaction driven primarily by the need for government to appear to be doing something.
Now that I am done bitching, I will call the nice bureaucrat and have her send me my tags so that I can poke them into my sheeps’ ears and do my part to eradicate a disease of marginal significance.
