Andrew Heggie wrote in message
...
On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 07:02:34 -0000, "Jim Webster"
wrote:

every bovine animal has to have two ear tags, its passport, every
movement off one holding onto another has to be reported. Even Zoos
have
to do this.


How is this policed and what are the regulations for other cloven
hooved animals?

I brought back in the x posting because Gordon and others might find
this interesting

"Trading Standards Officers" turn up at auction marts and check animals,
so most auction marts police it anyway to cover themselves.
The "Rural Payments agency have a rolling programme of random checks,
which intent to check every farm at least once in five years but more
often for larger farms. These checks are reckonned by the RPA to take an
average of about three days, most happen at a couple of hours notice,
and every animal has its eartag checked, plus they go through all your
movement records andwill checkthem against other peoples records.
Various bodies such as Trading Standards departments can turn up (an do)
unannounced to see you movement documents, it the documents are not up
to date you are locked down until the authorities are happy with them,
which can take six months.
Then there are fines and penalties.


I have an ulterior motive for wishing to know a bit more following a
dead cow arriving on some land near me. It strikes me it should easily
be possible to trace it, even in the absence of tags.


that is tricky because you would have to check an awful lot of farms to
find someone with one missing, and that person might well have had it
stolen or reported it stolen.

Should I be concerned if I can see cattle with tags missing, apart
from being an expense to the farmer is it serving a purpose, plainly
like other legislation avoiding complying could be a useful cost
saving the over legitimate farmer.

virtually impossible to avoid compliance in the longer term. The worst
offenders are dairy farmers whose cattle never move. They therefore
barely need tags as dairy farmers herds have more ID than you could
reasonably expect anyway. Dairy farmers tend to be the ones frantically
phoning for replacement tags because an old cow is booked in on to OTMS
and at slaughter ALL tags have to be absolutely correct.

Farmer to farmer deals are possible without proper tags but otherwise
you cannot move animals who are incorrectly tagged.


--
Jim Webster

"The pasture of stupidity is unwholesome to mankind"

'Abd-ar-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Khaldun al-Hadrami'


AJH