Don't Play With Fire
By Trent Loos

As a kid, my mother frequently told me, “Trent, don’t play with fire.” What is it about fire and kids? Is it that we are ignorant until we get burned? Are we rebelling to prove that we know better than our mom? We are the exception. Fire might burn other people but I am ME. No little match could hurt me. Either by trial and error or as witness to others’ misfortunes, we play enough times and we finally do get burned.

The following may be an unrelated story, unless of course you would like to draw your own analogy. The USDA has announced their intent to allow live cattle to once again cross the border into the U.S. Sealed containers, age verification and controlled destinations are all rules that should minimize the risk. Now I have never been one to think that we are better off with an isolation policy when it comes to trade, but I also remember my mother telling me that the smallest sparks can destroy the biggest person. Think about the western wildfires that devastated thousands of acres, homes, people and wildlife and were started with a single match.

Science says the risk to the United States consumer is non-existent with the border re-opening. But what is the risk to the 834,000 United States cattle owners and all industry related officials in the beef business? At the recent Western Ranchers Beef Cooperative meeting in Reno, NV, I heard a BSE expert, Dr. John Maas, say, “it is not time to re-open our border to live cattle.”

Dr. Maas has better handle on BSE than anybody I have ever heard discuss the disease. He is an extension veterinarian at the University of California-Davis and he is actually a cattleman. It is his professional opinion that “we should keep that border closed to live cattle until Canada has had no further BSE cases for seven years. We are safe as long as we import certain types of meat products but to bring across live animals is completely different in terms of this disease.”

He continued by saying Canada’s surveillance system is not comparable to that of the United States. They have tested 22,000 head while we have tested 178,000. “We need to realize that for our producers, our beef cattle producers, our ranchers, we have a zero tolerance for this disease so one case would be one too many.” He relayed the fact that BSE is spread from animal to animal by contaminated feed.

Canada is quick to point out that they banned the use of ruminant by-products in feed for cattle and other ruminants in 1997. Canada evidently has some trouble with compliance and/or enforcement of that law. In a Dow Jones report, Sergio Tolusso of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said that the feed and feed ingredients were sold as being free of animal matter, but microscopic examinations detected animal material in 66 of 110 samples tested between January and March of 2004.

I may not be smart enough to understand or predict the long-term economic implications of keeping the border closed to live animals, but I have a pretty good handle on the origin of four North American cows that tested positive for BSE. I have a pretty good understanding that there are violations of the feed ban. And I have a pretty clear understanding of the World Animal Health Organization (OIE) standards for minimal risk from cattle fed contaminated feed are for seven years.

USDA reports that we will exceed the 2002 level of $1.1 billion dollars worth of imported boxed beef from Canada in 2004. This is a 58% increase from 2003. I understand that the Canadian beef industry has suffered a $5 billion dollar loss from only three positive cows. But the world needs to understand that American beef producers did not cause that to happen.

The great news is that we, in the United States, live in representative form of government. As a cattleman and a citizen, I have the opportunity to tell my governmental leaders that this spark should be smothered before it has a chance to burn. We have two options at this point: sit back and complain about what is happening or use the phone, the internet or an old-fashioned 37-cent envelope to Washington DC to remind our elected officials that “Mother said never play with fire!”

 

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