National Animal Identification Scheme

For those of us in the UK who remember the emergence of BSE, the classical swine fever outbreak a few years back and the more recent foot and mouth epidemic, animal identification and traceability is unquestionably A Good Thing. So much so that it almost qualifies as a no-brainer.

It can come as quite a shock therefore to stumble across blogs unashamedly dedicated to campaigning against the USA's proposed National Animal Identification Scheme.

I've come across occasional conspiracy theories among the UK agricultural community - mostly aimed at Brussels and the European bureaucrats rather than UK politicos - but nothing on the scale suggested by the blog that I encountered this morning.

http://henwhisperer.blogspot.com/2007/01/much-to-talk-about-today.html


My question to you, gentle reader, is how does one effectively address this level of suspicion, prejudice and fear to make the case for NAIS?

Intellectual capital and the animal health industry

When a specialist newsletter like Animal Pharm loses a staff member it's a loss in many different respects. Obviously with a small team of writers, it's often a loss on a personal level.

I vividly remember losing our French reporter Nathalie Caplet and German reporter Faryal Mirza inside the space of a few weeks. I'd grown close to both of them in the two years we'd worked together and as well as the strain of losing half an editorial team there was the loss of two good friends to deal with. Nathalie returned to France and Faryal moved to Switzerland where her new husband was studying for a PhD.

(As it turned out, we all kept in touch. I visit Nathalie and her family whenever I get the opportunity (and not just because she lives in Bordeaux!) and Faryal is now one of our freelance business report authors.)

But there's another aspect to the loss of staff from a small editorial team; it's the loss of knowledge, understanding and contacts.

No matter how thorough the handover preparations, inevitably there is a loss of background knowledge. Sometimes that can take years to overcome.

There's no easy way to prevent this happening. But we're working on a way to limit the damage.

I'm in the early stages of preparing the brief for a new database. The aim is to populate it with constantly updated comprehensive company profiles for every company we know of that operates in the animal health industry, in any capacity, anywhere in the world and to link this to everything we've ever written about them.

It occurred to me that my editorial staff are not the only people who would be interested in easy access to that kind of database. So, let me know what you think.

As an Animal Pharm subscriber, would you like to have the option of direct access to our knowledge base?

If so, what would you like to see? What would be most useful?

The more input you give me, the better I can make the end product.