From Bonnie Chandler, Nigerian Dwarf goat breeder and dog trainer, Harvard, MA. Bonnie also serves as the American Goat Society liaison to the Goat Working Group for NAIS and is also a AKC legislative liason for a local dog club.

"I oppose NAIS because it would hurt small farmers and ordinary animal owners like me. I am a hobby farmer, which means I only sell privately and I lose money on my animals. I have them because I love them and because I want to produce my own, healthier food. But lack of profit is typical of commercial farmers as well. It's why small and medium-scale farmers are dying out, why every law or regulation that supposedly causes only a small increase in expense (but which invariably turns out to cause several times the trouble and expense originally thought) becomes the straw that breaks the camel's back for increasing percentages of the remaining farmers.

My barn vet likes to tell the joke about the old farmer who won the lottery. When asked what he would do with his millions - retire? travel? - he replies, "I think I'll just keep on farming until it's all used up." We farmers really appreciate that joke because it hits so close to home.

I am a member or board member of several dog clubs and livestock organisations. Specifically as regards this issue, I am AKC legislative liaison for the Colonial Shetland Sheepdog Club and, in the American Goat Society, I am District I Director, Secretary, and AGS representative to the USDA Goat Working Group, the group chaired by Linda Campbell tasked with designing the NAIS regulations for the goat species.

In the NAIS Goat Working Group, for months now we have been discussing
1) the impossibility of finding a form of identification (such as microchip) that will really work for all situations - pets, non-commercial meat animals, and animals intended for commercial meat;
2) which activities should require notification of the database --
-- and we have not been able to agree on anything, really, except that most of us think the whole NAIS is a bad idea.

Every member of the AGS board opposes NAIS, but the society has not made a public statement opposing NAIS because it fears for its non-profit status. This is true of most animal organizations. You have to understand that the organizations that would be hurt by NAIS are non-profit and run by amateurs, who aren't lawyers and don't know enough about the law to be sure that public advocacy wouldn't hurt their non-profit status, so they are afraid to speak up as organizations. Instead, they are urging their members to speak up as individuals. I have had a lot of conversations trying to persuade my dog and goat clubs to take public stands, but, since I'm not a lawyer myself, they aren't willing to take the chance on believing that organizations are allowed to defend their existence against laws that would essentially eliminate them.

For many years I have followed animal legislative issues. A lot of proposed (and often, passed) legislation about animals is unconstitutional (direct quote from a Congressional legislator in response to citizen inquiry: "We pass unconstitutional laws all the time!"), and most turns out to have far different effects from those originally advertised because so few people nowadays have enough real-life experience with animals to be able to read proposals and figure out what their effects will be. That is definitely the case with the NAIS, which will, in fact,
" increase the price of meat for all Americans,
" prevent people from owning livestock even for pets or for home-raised food,
" eliminate the safest, healthiest form of food - locally raised on small, non-factory farms
" reduce or even eliminate commercially available organic food
" eliminate shows and competitions, including fairs and 4-H, that help educate children and animal owners and improve the quality of the animals
" raise the cost of animal feed and veterinary treatment
" raise taxes (it will cost the government a lot to run their part of this boondoggle)
" curtail our American freedoms, especially for those who wish to avoid urban culture and follow an independent, country life-style.

Worse of all, it is unnecessary - there are already plenty of tracking systems and safeguards for animal health and the human food supply in place, and the only changes that would actually improve safety would be more testing at slaughterhouses and processing plants.

NAIS won't prevent disease outbreaks. Deliberate terrorism would start at large facilities and only involve after-the-fact-mopping up, and those systems are already in place. Most recent disease problems have involved smuggled animals - do you think those people would be likely to register with NAIS? The other major source of disease, wild animals, is similarly uncontrollable. NAIS won't even track enrolled animals reliably; individual animal tags fall off or are unsuitable for some species, databases get hacked regularly, and the whole program is too huge and complicated, too dependent on too many people being conscientious about providing information, to be reliable.

Why is it even being considered? It is being promoted only by those who would get a financial windfall from it - the microchip manufacturers, data-base operators, and agribusiness. Agribusiness wants to export meat and also to eliminate its non-commercial competition.

Why should everyone have to obey a law designed for the export market that fewer than 15 percent of American producers will ever be involved in? Why not make NAIS a requirement only for those that want to export?

Finally, NAIS is the result of "entangling aliances" the US has made with UN-based organizations. These include treaties and agreements signed with the World Trade Organization such as SPS (Sanitary and Phytosanitary) and TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) which allow countries to set regulations that must be met by other member countries in order to trade in agricultural goods. Another is the OIE (World Animal Health Organization) and Codex Alimentarius, both of which work closely with the UN in setting uniform standards for raising and exporting meat, farming practices, and traceability of individual animals.

It is completely unacceptable to allow policies within our country to be dictated from the outside, by countries and institutions whose standards and values for freedom and citizens' rights are very different from those here in America.

Unfortunately, it is also being dictated by USDA and state DAR (Department of Agriculture) bureaucrats without legislative oversight. There is no enabling legislation to create the NAIS. Bills for that purpose have been languishing in committee in the US Congress for almost two years and it is unlikely they will ever be passed. To get around this, USDA has been using its funds to essentially bribe state agriculture departments to implement the plan at the state level, by paying the state departments a flat fee per farm premise registered. Many of the states, including Massachusetts, are so eager for these funds that they are registering farmers without their knowledge, garnering names from agricultural census lists, health certificates issued, and similar sources. They say their charters allow them to do this with no enabling state legislation and without even the knowledge of farmers or legislators. Some states are using very misleading propaganda and even outright payments to persuade the farmers to register; some are proseletizing 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) kids and paying them to register their friends and neighbors.

In short, the USDA is using taxpayer money to bribe and hoodwink US citizens into signing up for a controversial program that will provide a financial windfall for the industries involved in running it but that has no enabling legislation from Congress. The USDA plans to use these "voluntary" signups as ammunition to try to persuade Congress and the states to pass the legislation. This stinks to high heaven."