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This was a dairy cow, and dairy cows have IDs on them. The ID was traced back to the farm in Washington. It's a dairy farm. And that farm now has been quarantined, and the owners have been very cooperative in doing that.

I think it's important that, as a matter of course, the brain and spinal column were removed from this cow, and that would be the material that would cause concern in terms of human health. And therefore we're confident in the safety of the food supply.

Actually, in this instance we do have probably a better tracking system than was the instance in Canada. Because this is a dairy cow, they're all individually tagged.

In this day and age when we do so much business in foreign trade, we need the ability to identify trace an animal very quickly, identifying where it came from - where it has been, and where it is at today.

I have to say that in this particular cow that we're dealing with, those parts of the cow were removed, and so we don't think there's any risk or very negligible risk to human health with this particular incident.

When one cow was found with BSE in 2003, many of our trading partners closed their borders to our beef.

The industry is becoming very ready for animal identification.

I think that's unjustified criticism. We have had a number of measures in place in this country for several years to mitigate the possibility of mad cow spreading in this country. We have found a single case.

We have experienced an utter explosion in investigative techniques. Walk the streets, look at the cameras! They are now recognising people automatically from photos; we have DNA fingerprinting, infrascan photos that can identify you from the veins in your face.

It's been studied to the point where we know that the impact on humans would be from consuming the most infected parts of the cow; that is, the brain and the spinal cord.