Lax Security At Border Worries
Arizona Stockman, Veterinarian
By David Bowser
HEREFORD, Ariz. — An Arizona veterinarian worries about illegal border crossings here. He's concerned not so much about the people who cross the border, but the cattle that come and go.
As the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps launched their fence building program along the Mexican border here about 15 miles west of the Naco, Ariz., border crossing, Gary Thrasher, DVM, was happy to see a barbed wire fence going up. It's a start.
"I have a very serious concern along the border here," Thrasher says. "I've been fighting to maintain a fence."
He says ranchers in this part of the world can spend 24 hours a day maintaining a fence along the 300-mile border Arizona shares with Mexico.
And it's not just the U.S. ranchers.
Here, the rancher on the Mexican side of the border put up a strong, five-wire barbed wire fence, using T-posts, because he was worried about the rancher's cattle on the U.S. side infecting his cattle with BVD.
"He was fed up with cattle going back and forth," Thrasher says. "That's a private rancher over there building his own fence."
Fences are not a new issue here. Cochise County has about an 85-mile border with Mexico.
"The first fence was built by ranchers in 1887," Thrasher says. "The ranchers built it not because of health problems, but because there were lots of duties and taxes to cross the border at that time. There was a severe drouth then, and the ranchers couldn't maintain their range conditions. Strays were everywhere."
It's not just the border or perimeter fences that are the concern now. Interior fencing that gets cut is also a problem.
"They can't do a pasture rotation here," Thrasher says. "It's impossible for them to do, even though they've got eight or nine pastures. Not only the border fence, but all those interior fences are being cut."
Thrasher says that in this part of the country they need livestock fences and vehicle barriers.
Smugglers driving through fences will take a quarter-mile of fencing out.
He says it's not just the ranch where the Minutemen are building fences today, but a whole chain of ranches all along the border.
He supports livestock fences and vehicle barriers, not tall metal walls.
Part of the problem, he says, it the Border Patrol.
"There will be days when there's 100 vehicles on this ranch," Thrasher says. "The first thing they tell you in bio-security is not to co-mingle your herds, and know everybody that comes on your place. It just gets absolutely ridiculous."
Many people complain that the Border Patrol is not doing a good job, but Thrasher says that complaint can be expanded to a number of agencies, including USDA.
"The USDA is negligent," Thrasher contends.
The problem in Arizona, he says, started 10 years ago when the Border Patrol closed the border at San Diego and El Paso, squeezing immigrants to the desert southwest.
"They created the Arizona corridor," Thrasher says. "They directed it through here because they thought it was more manageable, but what they're really telling you is because there are no voters out there to complain."
He says local officials have not represented the ranchers well.
"I live four miles off the border, and I watch this every day," he says.
The problem is complicated by a mixture of private and public lands.
Cochise County is about 30 percent private land.
"A lot of it is state land," Thrasher says. "A lot of it is federal land."
In certain areas, the government is not worried about animal health because an American owns the land on the other side of the border as well.
Much of the land from southwestern New Mexico to Douglas, Ariz., is owned or at least controlled by an American who has ranches on both sides of the border.
"He doesn't populate his place," Thrasher says. "He does mostly land preservation."
Thrasher lives in Hereford, a mail district between Sierra Vista and Bisbee, Ariz.
"I've worked along the border here for 35 years," Thrasher says.
A native of Ohio, he's managed ranches in Texas and Nevada.
"I came out here in 1971," Thrasher says. "My wife's family is from Arizona. I came out here and liked it. I was drafted and went in the Army. I requested Fort Huachuca and got it. I started practice here right after I got out."
His practice is about 95 percent beef cattle, Thrasher says.
For 15 years, he also had a company in Mexico that developed a system for spaying heifers to allow them to import from Mexico without brucellosis testing. In 13 years, his company spayed 800,000 heifers for export to the U.S.
"My company spayed heifers in Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon," Thrasher says. "We went all over."
He no longer spays heifers for importation into the U.S., however.
"The Mexican government now has that responsibility," Thrasher says, "but I do have consulting clients in Mexico. I work with Mexican veterinarians down there."
While the cattle are in Mexico, he says, their market is in the U.S.
Those Mexican cattle aren't exactly an extension of the U.S. cowherd, but the numbers that come across the border have a tremendous effect on the U.S. livestock economy and cattle cycle. Thrasher says livestock economists need to pay closer attention to those cattle.
He notes that the Mexican State of Sonora has 800,000 cattle. Arizona has 300,000.
"We're all pretty close together," Thrasher says. "I work both sides. There are not very many large animal veterinarians around here, so I work all along the border here."
So far, he says, there has been no sign of animal health problems, but there is a potential here that could devastate the beef industry.
"There's a very serious livestock problem threat," Thrasher says.
Chihuahua does not have a fully accredited tuberculosis-free herd.
"They still have to go through a TB test," Thrasher says.
Chihuahua borders on New Mexico and Texas. Both states are continuing to have problems with tuberculosis.
"It's a very serious problem," Thrasher insists.
On the other hand, Sonora, which borders Arizona, is essentially tuberculosis-free, Thrasher says. He says the northern 85 percent of the Mexican state is free of the disease.
"Sonora is very progressive," Thrasher says. "They started a TB program before every other state in Mexico."
They also have a successful brucellosis program.
"They're a much safer herd for TB and brucellosis," Thrasher says.
But the threat is still there.
"It doesn't make any difference if you're sitting in the middle of the State of Texas and all your neighbors have animal health problems like BVD," Thrasher says. "You have to do some bio-security in herd and health management."
The first thing is to try keeping cattle from co-mingling with unknown herds.
"Here we have 300 miles of co-mingling," Thrasher says, looking at a torn barbed wire fence just outside his pickup that marks the Arizona border with Mexico on this ranch. "There's no way to actually do a herd health management program or range management program."
He says there's no bio-security program here because all the fences along the border have holes in them.
"There are new holes every night," he says.
Until 1980, Thrasher says the USDA by state and districts maintained a fence watch.
"They called them quarantine officers, he says.
The quarantine officials rode fence individually or in pairs, Thrasher says. They helped ranchers patch fences, find holes in the wire and return strays before they got co-mingled with cattle on this side of the border.
"In 1980, they stopped funding it totally in Arizona," Thrasher says. "The only place that it's done now is in the tick regions of South Texas."
He says the USDA has a million rules and regulations at border crossings. They enforce those rules on cattle crossing at the ports of entry.
But out here in the country, he says, cattle are wandering back and forth with little to impede their movements.
"Our cattle go south," Thrasher says. "Their cattle go north."
Keeping track of the cattle has been left to the individual ranchers on both sides of the border.
"For a rancher here to function, he needs to cooperate with his Mexican neighbor," Thrasher says.
Ranchers here regularly return Mexican cattle that have strayed across the border. In return, most of the Mexican ranchers will return or at least hold cattle that stray off into their pastures south of the border until the U.S ranchers can retrieve them.
It's a handshake deal, a gentlemen's agreement, between neighbors, except these neighbors are separated by an international boundary line.
While it's not a universal agreement along the 700 miles of border between the U.S. and Mexico, it seems to have worked well between ranchers along this stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border.
Thrasher says he has four clients along the border who on a daily or weekly basis return cattle to Mexico and pick theirs up.
"That's crossing the border without the proper health certification," Thrasher says. "That's a federal offense."
But the federal government is forcing them to do it, Thrasher adds.
"The Border Patrol watches them stick the cattle back through the fence," he says.
There are no USDA watchdogs here.
On the other hand, Thrasher says he can go down into Mexico, and if his truck has too much hay left in the back, they make him go back and sweep it all out.
"I come up here, and cattle are going every which direction," Thrasher says.
A few hundred feet to the west of where Thrasher is parked, the desert floor drops off in an arroyo. Officially, it is known as the San Pedro River Riparian Area.
That strip is under the control of the Bureau of Land Management.
"They don't maintain their fences on the perimeter and don't maintain it at all at the river," Thrasher says of the federal agency.
There is a metal barrier at the river, which for the most part is a dry wash, but broken strands of barbed wire hang at either side. Cattle wandering across the border where the San Pedro River crosses into the U.S. can travel 50 miles to the north and mingle with U.S. cattle on the way.
"I lease a ranch 10 miles north of here," Thrasher says.
The veterinarian says if one animal with foot and mouth disease wanders the wrong way, the cattle industry could have major problems.
Although the livestock is his major concern, Thrasher says such diseases could also be brought across the border by illegal immigrants.
"Last year, 7500 to 10,000, depending upon whose figures you use, Brazilians crossed through this county," Thrasher says.
Brazilians fly into Mexico City, he says, then fly to the state capitol of Sonora, Hermosillo, and take shuttle buses right to the border.
"They are here within two and a half days," Thrasher says.
Foot and mouth disease is on and off in South America, he shrugs.
"They have an outbreak going right now," Thrasher says.
The outbreak in England a decade ago that devastated the British cattle industry was due to garbage from an ethnic restaurant. Migrants crossing the border here bring snacks and dried meat. They could bring it in on their boots or shoes.
"They could accidentally bring foot and mouth here," Thrasher says. "Then we'd have a disaster."
A more dangerous scenario is someone bringing foot and mouth disease intentionally.
"I've been hesitant to push that," Thrasher says.
He says he's talked to a lot of people about it, though, including USDA.
"I just spent a week at the Center for Epidemiology at Colorado State University with the Colorado Department of Agriculture at an emerging exotic disease practitioners' course," Thrasher says. "All we talked about was those foreign animal diseases that could come into the country."
A lot of them share symptoms of diseases already in the U.S., so detecting them is doubly difficult.
"I get to be a nervous wreck when I come out here and somebody's lost 10 cows to a poisonous plant," Thrasher says. "I worry that it may be some foreign animal disease."
He says he pays close attention to animal deaths on ranches along the border.
"It's not something that can be contained like it can at a small dairy in Iowa," Thrasher says. "It's a whole different ball of wax."
Here where desert ranches are measured in sections rather than acres, half the state could be quarantined in an animal disease outbreak, and that's if it is caught in time.
Because half of his clients are more than 150 miles away, it's got to be a major disaster before ranchers call Thrasher to look at dead or sick cattle.
"I do belong to the Arizona Livestock Emergency Response Team, ALERT," Thrasher says. "I have lots of training and they've given me lots of equipment to try to nip things in the bud quicker, but these expanses are just impossible to handle."
Fortunately, he says, the climate is dry and the cattle are dispersed enough that there wouldn't be the kind of disease transmission that would be found in confined feeding operations where there are large numbers of animals in a relatively small space.
Still, he points out that 40 miles north of the border is a 20,000-head feedyard near Wilcox, Ariz., and a 100,000-head feedyard north of Yuma.
Because there are only a few feedlots left in Arizona, many of the cattle here move to feedyards in Texas, Kansas or Nebraska.
"They move all over the country," Thrasher says. "If something was going on that was incubating, it would be in all states before I even notice it."
Most of the U.S. cattle herd has been so protected over the years that it is immunologically naive.
"They won't have a natural resistance for some of these diseases to which they may be exposed," Thrasher points out. "What other herds may be able to tolerate, the U.S. herd's going to blow with it."
Arizona Stockman, Veterinarian
By David Bowser
HEREFORD, Ariz. — An Arizona veterinarian worries about illegal border crossings here. He's concerned not so much about the people who cross the border, but the cattle that come and go.
As the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps launched their fence building program along the Mexican border here about 15 miles west of the Naco, Ariz., border crossing, Gary Thrasher, DVM, was happy to see a barbed wire fence going up. It's a start.
"I have a very serious concern along the border here," Thrasher says. "I've been fighting to maintain a fence."
He says ranchers in this part of the world can spend 24 hours a day maintaining a fence along the 300-mile border Arizona shares with Mexico.
And it's not just the U.S. ranchers.
Here, the rancher on the Mexican side of the border put up a strong, five-wire barbed wire fence, using T-posts, because he was worried about the rancher's cattle on the U.S. side infecting his cattle with BVD.
"He was fed up with cattle going back and forth," Thrasher says. "That's a private rancher over there building his own fence."
Fences are not a new issue here. Cochise County has about an 85-mile border with Mexico.
"The first fence was built by ranchers in 1887," Thrasher says. "The ranchers built it not because of health problems, but because there were lots of duties and taxes to cross the border at that time. There was a severe drouth then, and the ranchers couldn't maintain their range conditions. Strays were everywhere."
It's not just the border or perimeter fences that are the concern now. Interior fencing that gets cut is also a problem.
"They can't do a pasture rotation here," Thrasher says. "It's impossible for them to do, even though they've got eight or nine pastures. Not only the border fence, but all those interior fences are being cut."
Thrasher says that in this part of the country they need livestock fences and vehicle barriers.
Smugglers driving through fences will take a quarter-mile of fencing out.
He says it's not just the ranch where the Minutemen are building fences today, but a whole chain of ranches all along the border.
He supports livestock fences and vehicle barriers, not tall metal walls.
Part of the problem, he says, it the Border Patrol.
"There will be days when there's 100 vehicles on this ranch," Thrasher says. "The first thing they tell you in bio-security is not to co-mingle your herds, and know everybody that comes on your place. It just gets absolutely ridiculous."
Many people complain that the Border Patrol is not doing a good job, but Thrasher says that complaint can be expanded to a number of agencies, including USDA.
"The USDA is negligent," Thrasher contends.
The problem in Arizona, he says, started 10 years ago when the Border Patrol closed the border at San Diego and El Paso, squeezing immigrants to the desert southwest.
"They created the Arizona corridor," Thrasher says. "They directed it through here because they thought it was more manageable, but what they're really telling you is because there are no voters out there to complain."
He says local officials have not represented the ranchers well.
"I live four miles off the border, and I watch this every day," he says.
The problem is complicated by a mixture of private and public lands.
Cochise County is about 30 percent private land.
"A lot of it is state land," Thrasher says. "A lot of it is federal land."
In certain areas, the government is not worried about animal health because an American owns the land on the other side of the border as well.
Much of the land from southwestern New Mexico to Douglas, Ariz., is owned or at least controlled by an American who has ranches on both sides of the border.
"He doesn't populate his place," Thrasher says. "He does mostly land preservation."
Thrasher lives in Hereford, a mail district between Sierra Vista and Bisbee, Ariz.
"I've worked along the border here for 35 years," Thrasher says.
A native of Ohio, he's managed ranches in Texas and Nevada.
"I came out here in 1971," Thrasher says. "My wife's family is from Arizona. I came out here and liked it. I was drafted and went in the Army. I requested Fort Huachuca and got it. I started practice here right after I got out."
His practice is about 95 percent beef cattle, Thrasher says.
For 15 years, he also had a company in Mexico that developed a system for spaying heifers to allow them to import from Mexico without brucellosis testing. In 13 years, his company spayed 800,000 heifers for export to the U.S.
"My company spayed heifers in Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon," Thrasher says. "We went all over."
He no longer spays heifers for importation into the U.S., however.
"The Mexican government now has that responsibility," Thrasher says, "but I do have consulting clients in Mexico. I work with Mexican veterinarians down there."
While the cattle are in Mexico, he says, their market is in the U.S.
Those Mexican cattle aren't exactly an extension of the U.S. cowherd, but the numbers that come across the border have a tremendous effect on the U.S. livestock economy and cattle cycle. Thrasher says livestock economists need to pay closer attention to those cattle.
He notes that the Mexican State of Sonora has 800,000 cattle. Arizona has 300,000.
"We're all pretty close together," Thrasher says. "I work both sides. There are not very many large animal veterinarians around here, so I work all along the border here."
So far, he says, there has been no sign of animal health problems, but there is a potential here that could devastate the beef industry.
"There's a very serious livestock problem threat," Thrasher says.
Chihuahua does not have a fully accredited tuberculosis-free herd.
"They still have to go through a TB test," Thrasher says.
Chihuahua borders on New Mexico and Texas. Both states are continuing to have problems with tuberculosis.
"It's a very serious problem," Thrasher insists.
On the other hand, Sonora, which borders Arizona, is essentially tuberculosis-free, Thrasher says. He says the northern 85 percent of the Mexican state is free of the disease.
"Sonora is very progressive," Thrasher says. "They started a TB program before every other state in Mexico."
They also have a successful brucellosis program.
"They're a much safer herd for TB and brucellosis," Thrasher says.
But the threat is still there.
"It doesn't make any difference if you're sitting in the middle of the State of Texas and all your neighbors have animal health problems like BVD," Thrasher says. "You have to do some bio-security in herd and health management."
The first thing is to try keeping cattle from co-mingling with unknown herds.
"Here we have 300 miles of co-mingling," Thrasher says, looking at a torn barbed wire fence just outside his pickup that marks the Arizona border with Mexico on this ranch. "There's no way to actually do a herd health management program or range management program."
He says there's no bio-security program here because all the fences along the border have holes in them.
"There are new holes every night," he says.
Until 1980, Thrasher says the USDA by state and districts maintained a fence watch.
"They called them quarantine officers, he says.
The quarantine officials rode fence individually or in pairs, Thrasher says. They helped ranchers patch fences, find holes in the wire and return strays before they got co-mingled with cattle on this side of the border.
"In 1980, they stopped funding it totally in Arizona," Thrasher says. "The only place that it's done now is in the tick regions of South Texas."
He says the USDA has a million rules and regulations at border crossings. They enforce those rules on cattle crossing at the ports of entry.
But out here in the country, he says, cattle are wandering back and forth with little to impede their movements.
"Our cattle go south," Thrasher says. "Their cattle go north."
Keeping track of the cattle has been left to the individual ranchers on both sides of the border.
"For a rancher here to function, he needs to cooperate with his Mexican neighbor," Thrasher says.
Ranchers here regularly return Mexican cattle that have strayed across the border. In return, most of the Mexican ranchers will return or at least hold cattle that stray off into their pastures south of the border until the U.S ranchers can retrieve them.
It's a handshake deal, a gentlemen's agreement, between neighbors, except these neighbors are separated by an international boundary line.
While it's not a universal agreement along the 700 miles of border between the U.S. and Mexico, it seems to have worked well between ranchers along this stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border.
Thrasher says he has four clients along the border who on a daily or weekly basis return cattle to Mexico and pick theirs up.
"That's crossing the border without the proper health certification," Thrasher says. "That's a federal offense."
But the federal government is forcing them to do it, Thrasher adds.
"The Border Patrol watches them stick the cattle back through the fence," he says.
There are no USDA watchdogs here.
On the other hand, Thrasher says he can go down into Mexico, and if his truck has too much hay left in the back, they make him go back and sweep it all out.
"I come up here, and cattle are going every which direction," Thrasher says.
A few hundred feet to the west of where Thrasher is parked, the desert floor drops off in an arroyo. Officially, it is known as the San Pedro River Riparian Area.
That strip is under the control of the Bureau of Land Management.
"They don't maintain their fences on the perimeter and don't maintain it at all at the river," Thrasher says of the federal agency.
There is a metal barrier at the river, which for the most part is a dry wash, but broken strands of barbed wire hang at either side. Cattle wandering across the border where the San Pedro River crosses into the U.S. can travel 50 miles to the north and mingle with U.S. cattle on the way.
"I lease a ranch 10 miles north of here," Thrasher says.
The veterinarian says if one animal with foot and mouth disease wanders the wrong way, the cattle industry could have major problems.
Although the livestock is his major concern, Thrasher says such diseases could also be brought across the border by illegal immigrants.
"Last year, 7500 to 10,000, depending upon whose figures you use, Brazilians crossed through this county," Thrasher says.
Brazilians fly into Mexico City, he says, then fly to the state capitol of Sonora, Hermosillo, and take shuttle buses right to the border.
"They are here within two and a half days," Thrasher says.
Foot and mouth disease is on and off in South America, he shrugs.
"They have an outbreak going right now," Thrasher says.
The outbreak in England a decade ago that devastated the British cattle industry was due to garbage from an ethnic restaurant. Migrants crossing the border here bring snacks and dried meat. They could bring it in on their boots or shoes.
"They could accidentally bring foot and mouth here," Thrasher says. "Then we'd have a disaster."
A more dangerous scenario is someone bringing foot and mouth disease intentionally.
"I've been hesitant to push that," Thrasher says.
He says he's talked to a lot of people about it, though, including USDA.
"I just spent a week at the Center for Epidemiology at Colorado State University with the Colorado Department of Agriculture at an emerging exotic disease practitioners' course," Thrasher says. "All we talked about was those foreign animal diseases that could come into the country."
A lot of them share symptoms of diseases already in the U.S., so detecting them is doubly difficult.
"I get to be a nervous wreck when I come out here and somebody's lost 10 cows to a poisonous plant," Thrasher says. "I worry that it may be some foreign animal disease."
He says he pays close attention to animal deaths on ranches along the border.
"It's not something that can be contained like it can at a small dairy in Iowa," Thrasher says. "It's a whole different ball of wax."
Here where desert ranches are measured in sections rather than acres, half the state could be quarantined in an animal disease outbreak, and that's if it is caught in time.
Because half of his clients are more than 150 miles away, it's got to be a major disaster before ranchers call Thrasher to look at dead or sick cattle.
"I do belong to the Arizona Livestock Emergency Response Team, ALERT," Thrasher says. "I have lots of training and they've given me lots of equipment to try to nip things in the bud quicker, but these expanses are just impossible to handle."
Fortunately, he says, the climate is dry and the cattle are dispersed enough that there wouldn't be the kind of disease transmission that would be found in confined feeding operations where there are large numbers of animals in a relatively small space.
Still, he points out that 40 miles north of the border is a 20,000-head feedyard near Wilcox, Ariz., and a 100,000-head feedyard north of Yuma.
Because there are only a few feedlots left in Arizona, many of the cattle here move to feedyards in Texas, Kansas or Nebraska.
"They move all over the country," Thrasher says. "If something was going on that was incubating, it would be in all states before I even notice it."
Most of the U.S. cattle herd has been so protected over the years that it is immunologically naive.
"They won't have a natural resistance for some of these diseases to which they may be exposed," Thrasher points out. "What other herds may be able to tolerate, the U.S. herd's going to blow with it."
