Canadian cattle that lack ID tags enter U.S.

SPOKANE — 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 ID tags, according to documents obtained by cattle ranchers in Washington state.

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 this 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 ID tags or 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. They say the lax regulation 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 that the cattle are healthy and less than 30 months old; 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.

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, is a group of ranchers and cattle brokers many of whose members live not far from where the first U.S. case of mad-cow disease was discovered in December 2003.

That dairy cow, found in Mabton, Yakima County, had been imported from Canada, which had discovered its own case of mad-cow four months earlier.

After the 2003 mad-cow discoveries, the USDA halted the shipment of Canadian cattle and beef products into the U.S. 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 rules that govern Canadian imports. They are concerned about the impact of lower-priced Canadian imports on their own businesses, and the potential spread of disease from Canadian cattle that don't have proper medical papers.

The cattlemen notified the USDA of the documentation problems several weeks ago, according to Bruce Knight, the USDA's undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs.

The documents also suggest that Washington state has had difficulty tracking Canadian cattle once they are in the U.S. In early 2006, for instance, the state Agriculture Department sent out notices trying to determine where older Canadian cows might be.

A notice dated March 9, 2006, from Cynthia Fairley, of the state's animal-identification program, asked an unidentified cattle company about 219 Canadian cattle in the U.S. that apparently were over the 30-month age limit.

"Here is the list of ... Canadian cattle over 30 months old for which we have no record of slaughter," Fairley wrote. "Could you please verify that they have gone and where they've gone?"

In an e-mail Feb. 3, 2006, to a cattle company, Fairley listed 32 cattle that were missing health certificates. "I know it seems like a lot," Fairley wrote, "but we've accounted for every scrap of paper and they're definitely not here."