A friend of our family emailed me an interesting item this morning. It really got me to thinking. What was said in that single paragraph really speaks volumes about the functioning of our federal government. To understand what she was talking about, we must travel back in time a few years to the days when this country was threatened by the Mad Cow disease. With that as a starting point, this is the paragraph I received.
“Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow born in Canada almost 3 years ago, right down to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? Plus, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But, they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country.”
Now just to put these numbers into a perspective everyone can understand, in Canada today there is a count of 13.5 million cattle, but this is down a bit in inventory. Canada usually is raising about 15 million cattle. A large number of these animals are sold in the United States. To that figure we need to add another 43 million head of cattle being raised in the United States, which are sold everywhere. You can do the math on this one. To check these cattle and see if any were infected with Mad Cow, our government had to track down the lifetime movements of the animals from birthing to slaughter…and that would be a total of more than 58 million cattle.
Now, the argument here will be those farmers and ranchers keep records on all the cattle they sell. There are no records on the illegal aliens. That does not necessarily ring true. I can recall several times here in Texas when members of my family went to ranches or farms to buy beef for the freezer. We made our purchases and I don’t recall even exchanging names or phone numbers with the rancher.
So, back to the original question… If our government can track down a cow three years after the initial sale and go even further, track down the calves of that specific cow…why can’t it locate the illegal aliens who are spread across the country?
Perhaps we should do what the Mad Cow item suggested in jest at the end of the text. Perhaps we should have someone at the border issue each illegal alien a cow as he or she crosses into our country. Since we can always locate our cattle, perhaps that would help us to locate those who break the law by violating our borders.
