By Sept. 1 it will be illegal to load, transport or move cattle to a Canadian farmer, feedlot, cattle dealer, auction market or packer without an approved ear tag, says a Canadian Cattle Identification Agency official.
While recognized CCIA ear tags have been required by law for a year, the rules have not been enforced to give cattle producers time to fully comply with the existing regulations.
The discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in a cow in northern Alberta has changed all that, said Charlie Gracey, a long-time cattle producer and consultant to the CCIA board.
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“Most of the producers are now compliant. There is no hardship there,” said Gracey, who added the biggest complaint from producers is that the agency is not enforcing the ear tag regulations.
When the cattle identification system was implemented July 1, 2002, auction markets, dealers and packing plants refused to enforce the rules.
The discovery of a single cow with BSE and the following turmoil convinced many, including opponents, of the need for every animal to have an approved ear tag.
“If you can’t take cattle to the packing plant unless they’re tagged, it won’t take that long for that to filter down,” Gracey said.
The only exemption to the regulation is that producers are allowed to transport an animal to an approved tagging site, often at auction markets, where staff will tag the animal.
“The (rules) are not going to be any hardship to producers because 95 percent of them were already obeying,” Gracey said.
“Their feelings aren’t going to be hurt if we’re a little tough on the other five percent that aren’t.”
By the end of the year, an exemption that allowed cattle to travel to a show ring, community pasture, test station or vet clinic without a tag will also disappear.
“The board has already decided that’s history.”
The board has also discussed double tagging breeding cattle to reduce the chances of older cattle losing their ear tags. About five percent of the plastic ear tags are lost after they’re tagged to an animal’s ear. The small inexpensive metal curl lock tags have a two percent loss rate.
Gracey said the possibility of losing both ear tags is remote and will improve the system’s reliability.
“We are going to have to look at that,” said Gracey, who added the board wants to maintain the program’s credibility yet is anxious not to dump more expenses on producers hard hit by the border closure and lost markets.
“If Japan or United States says, ‘you should do this to get back in our market,’ we’ll do anything totally reasonable or possible to accommodate that. If there is no assurance that this will win us access to markets, we aren’t going to be putting producers to any increased expense at a time like this.”
