Cattle branding comes under fire; icon of the West may fade away

One of the West's most enduring symbols is fading like a red-hot branding iron cools to ashen gray. With concerns over disease and global trade trumping tradition, federal regulators want ranchers to swap the old-fashioned cattle brand for electronic ear tags to identify livestock quickly and reliably. Ranchers accept the inevitability but lament the passing of a ritual older than America — the smell of trampled sagebrush and burned hide, the sound of whinnying horses, songs around campfires and friendly boasts among friends. "Cowboys are said to ride for the brand. It's hard to imagine anyone riding for an ear tag," said Jon Christensen, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. The debate over the proposal by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with a final rule expected within months, "is not just a fight over the best way to identify, track and ensure the ownership and safety of cattle," Christensen said. "This is a battle over a powerful western icon." But the discovery in late 2003 of a cow in Washington's Yakima Valley infected with mad-cow disease inspired federal officials to find a better way to instantly track livestock. They feared the U.S. could suffer the same fate as the United Kingdom, which quarantined and killed tens of thousands of animals after a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, devastating its agricultural economy. The USDA wants every cow to have a unique numerical ID, electronically embedded into an RFID ear tag, to make it easier to track animals from the ranch to feedlots and the slaughterhouse. Then, if a sick animal is found, the source of illness could be found — and isolated — within hours. And lucrative global markets, such as Japan, now are demanding that meat be proven safe and "traceable" before entering the country. Once every cow has an RFID tag, the brand — as a vital identification mark — would become less critical. "I see brands playing a smaller role as we move into this electronic age," said longtime Monterey County-based rancher Jim Warren, 70, a pioneer in early adoption of radio-tagging for 1,000 Central California cattle producers who sell through his 101 Livestock Inc. auction barn. "We have to be forward thinking," said Warren, over a lunch of chili before an afternoon of busy bidding in the small town of Aromas. "Branding still has its place — it's a means to identify cattle within a state. But we are a global economy. We no longer have the luxury of saying we will only do business within our own borders." Hot-iron brands have played an enduring and beloved role — they're family logos, like a ranching coat of arms — ever since they were introduced to the New World in 1541 by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés, whose cattle were singed with three crosses. Still, no 15-character alphanumeric identification code can ever replace a "Lazy J," "Hanging R" or "Flying 45," said Bill Bullard of the Billings, Mont.-based Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America. "The government is giving in to international pressure to adopt a one-size-fits-all system that replaces the American tradition of branding, which has been used for centuries successfully," he said. "Our ability to control and eradicate disease has earned us the envy of the world — and now the USDA proposes to throw out an integral part of our program."...more