America’s Soft Underbelly

Bioterror

According to the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress , long-distance live animal transport not only places countries at risk for catastrophic disease outbreaks,881 but it makes them vulnerable to bioterrorism as well.⁸⁸² U.S. animal agriculture has been described as a particularly easy target,⁸⁸³ as “one of the probable threats for an economic attack on this country,”⁸⁸⁴ according to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and also as a direct attack on our citizenry.

In 2004, the RAND Corporation prepared a report on agroterrorism for the Office of the Secretary of Defense titled, Hitting America’s Soft Underbelly. It blamed America’s vulnerability in part on the “concentrated and intensive nature of contemporary U.S. farming practices.”⁸⁸⁵ According to the last USDA census in 1997, just 2% of the nation’s feedlots produced three-quarters of the cattle and 1% of U.S. egg farms confine more than three-fourths of the nation’s egg-laying hens.⁸⁸⁶ Given that “highly crowded” animals are reared in “extreme proximity” in the United States, one infected animal could quickly expose thousands of others.⁸⁸⁷

The RAND Corporation points out that individual animals raised by U.S. agriculture have become progressively more prone to disease as a result of increasingly routine invasive procedures: Herds that have been subjected to such modifications—which have included everything from sterilization programs to dehorning, branding, and hormone injections—have typically suffered higher stress levels that have lowered the animals’ natural tolerance to disease from contagious organisms and increased the viral and bacterial “volumes” that they normally shed in the event of an infection.⁸⁸⁸ Long-distance live transport could then ferry the spreading infection, according to USDA models, to as many as 25 states within five days.⁸⁸⁹ Curtailing the long-distance live transport of animals, as well as the concentration and intensification of the food animal industry, could thus potentially be a matter of national security.