Recent updates in the U.S. pork industry include permanent funding for the USDA’s Beagle Brigade, draft air quality guidelines for livestock farms from the EPA, and ongoing opposition to California’s Prop 12 by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC). These are the latest developments.
The threat of African Swine Fever entering North America is still as large as it ever was, and so is the devastation it would cause to US pork farms. The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) is therefore happily greeting news that the Beagle Brigade Act introduced last year has been approved by the US Senate, lending permanent funds and formally providing congressional authorization for the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Detector Dog Training Center in Georgia.
The center has been operating through unstable user fees, which dropped during the pandemic. For decades, these dogs have been used at airports, ports and land borders to alert handlers to contraband materials. The NPPC shares that “on a typical day, Border Patrol seizes more than 4,600 plants, meat and animal byproducts that must be quarantined or destroyed.”
NPPC’s science and technology legal counsel Andrew Bailey has stated “we have been working really hard over the years to keep it funded to make sure they’re properly staffed up…[These dogs] are that first line of defense against foreign animal diseases.”
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