On 5 February 2010, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack announced that the USDA was revising its approach to achieving a national capability for animal disease traceability. The previous plan, called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), first proposed in 2002, was being abandoned. In its place, the USDA proposes a new approach that will allow individual states (and tribal nations) to choose their own degree of within-state animal identification and traceability for livestock populations. Under this revised focus, states may choose to have no mandatory animal ID and traceability...