WASHINGTON -- Investigators never located all 80 of the cattle that crossed the Canadian border with a dairy cow that brought the first known case of mad cow disease into the United States.

Eighteen months later, the government is proposing a national tracking system that would pinpoint an animal's movements within 48 hours after a disease is discovered.

"This is where we start really talking about changing how the industry operates," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Thursday.

The discovery of the infected cow in late 2003 had Agriculture Department investigators trying to track down other cows that also might be infected.

Four weeks later, they could account for only 19 of the 80 other cows and never did find them all. Still, officials assured the public that the meat they were eating was safe.

Cattle ranchers are concerned about mandatory tracking because they want records kept confidential and do not want to pay for the system, which the industry has estimated could cost $550 million over five years.

The government's plan to register and report the movements of cattle, hogs, poultry and other livestock from birth to slaughter would be voluntary at first. It would become mandatory by January 2009.

Under the plan, cattle would be identified individually with tags or other devices. There are high-tech ways to monitor their movements, such as using radio-frequency ear tags, retinal scans of their eyes or even DNA testing.

Hogs and poultry could be registered in groups because that typically is how they move through the chain of production, according to the proposal.

"A system that will allow us to pinpoint, track and isolate threats to health is enormously important, and this issue is too important for us to get it wrong," Johanns said. "The threat to animal health and thus our food supply, both unintentional and intentional, are very real."

A consumer group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, wants the administration to move more quickly. Canada, which has confirmed three cases of mad cow disease, took just one year to switch to a mandatory system, said the group's food safety director, Caroline Smith DeWaal.

Efforts to keep documents confidential are an important part of the proposal, which seeks to exclude records from the federal Freedom of Information Act, said the Agriculture Department's chief economist Keith Collins.

Also in dispute is who should bear the cost of such a program. Collins said that states and the livestock industry should share the cost with the Agriculture Department, which spent $19 million on the effort last year and will spend $33 million this year.

To keep costs down, Colville, Wash., cattle producer Ted Wishon wants the government to accept hot-iron brands, which are allowed under his state's identification system, instead of ear tags.

"It's cheaper. It's already in place. The state and producers have invested a lot of time, money and effort into that program," said Wishon, a member of R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America.

The dominant cattle ranchers' group, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, is developing its own animal identification system and hopes to persuade the department to use it. The group will test its program this fall, association lobbyist Jay Truitt said.

Producers "don't believe the government can truly protect what will turn out to be confidential business information associated with an animal's records," he said.

The plan is for states to be capable of registering ranches, feed lots, livestock barns, packing plants and other facilities by July of this year. Those premises would be required to register by January 2008, and mandatory reporting of livestock movement would begin one year later.

While the proposal calls for mandatory rather voluntary reporting, "somebody may convince us otherwise," Johanns said. But Johanns said it would be tough for a system with gaps in identification to be effective.

The nation's cattle herd numbers 96 million, according to federal surveys. There are 60 million hogs and nearly 9 billion chickens in the United States.

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