<<THIS IS A SETUP by the USDA !!! They are pushing for the RFID chips in EVERY dang chicken and animal everywhere in the country!!!>>
Not exactly EVERY chicken/animal... *We* would all have to, but the big CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) places only have to get one number for the whole flock/herd. After all, it's soooo much easier for them to keep track of hundreds of thousands than for us to keep track of 20 or so!
And by the way--the RFID chips on cattle have failed miserably in Australia and Canada--hard to read, with a 3 to 7% error/failure rate--might be failed chips, interference from metal around the monitoring device, lost ear-tags, whatever--in Australia, that adds up to about a million cattle a year. Since ear-tags do get ripped out, subcutaneous chips have been suggested--but that adds to the cost of finding and removing the chip at slaughter--consumers don't want them in their meat. Also, the extra time it takes to attempt to read all those chips actually results in death of animals, because it takes up to three times longer at, say, a cattle auction--three days as opposed to one--during which time the stress can either cause an animal to die outright, or *develop* things like salmonella...
And in our case, suppose one of your chipped chickens gets nabbed by a hawk or whatever. When the USDA official comes to "read" your facility, he discovers you are short a hen, and you are in trouble because you don't know where one went (spreading disease with it, of course)...
And one final problem that's shown up in Australia. You know how computers hold onto information--like when you get on someone's mailing list, or your house number gets on a list incorrectly? That's also plagued the system over there. Cattle that have been slaughtered don't get deleted from the government lists, and the farmer is still on record as having them...
Rhonda
Sidesaddle Hall of Famer
Five-time US National Sidesaddle Champion
CHICKENS-101@yahoogroups.com
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