The Pebble and the Avalanche

Thu, 2006-May-04, 06:56

Ranchers and farmers continue to reject government proposals to track all farm animals in the United States. The government wants a comprehensive system to track and identify the movements of each and every farm animal to help isolate instances of mad-cow disease.

Farmers, ranchers, and others oppose the initiative for a variety of reasons. For example, rodeo competitors would have to inform the government each time they take a horse from one location to another — a rule they view as nightmarish to implement and an intrusion of privacy. But perhaps the biggest worry is lawsuits: if the government traces the source of infection back to a single farm, lawsuits would surely follow. The owners of a destroyed herd would be sorely tempted to file lawsuits, and if some human caught mad-cow disease, everyone who ever came into contact with an infected cow would find themselves in court.

One answer to the problem of lawsuits is strict disaggregation of identity from liability: grant legal protections to anyone who participates in the identification program or cooperates with post-infection investigations. Laws restrict access to hospital and medical records; maybe these veterinary records deserve the same protection. But restriction information would be hard to do, and since the destruction of a herd of cattle is hard to conceal, participants in the program should be immune from lawsuits. (And that immunity should have some teeth, because otherwise lawyers will file court briefs arguing that the law itself is invalid, or that a particular participant wasn't really in compliance and therefore shouldn't be protected — and defending against those allegations can also be hideously expensive.)

The current plan is a government-imposed mandate that will itself be litigated in court and grudgingly implemented — not the optimal response to a major risk to the health of people and the health of an industry.