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Ranchers Have Beef With USDA Program To ID Cattle
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System say that computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities. The ranchers also note that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database. 'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS. One group has issued a bumper sticker that reads, 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.' 'They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this,' says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. 'This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it.'"
You aren't the mainstream media, you don't have to put those oh so clever puns in the title.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
The point still remains that the same technology could be used for people for the same reasons especially if we have a few more swine flu or bird flu scares. Don't you realize that every violation of rights starts really really small? First copy protection just involved a word you had to type from the manual, not too bad right? Then it required serial codes, then you needed to register the serial codes on the internet and people started to get hurt (I remember buying a game at a large retailer with an already used serial code, so what did they do? They gave me a new game then I saw them hand it off to another person to be restocked back on the shelves.... But fact is, everything starts small, sure now this isn't a big deal, but one or two more swine flu outbreaks and it will inch closer to 1984 ever so slowly....
Plus this could be used for slight bits of research for use in humans too.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.