The USDA's War on a Family Farm
By Chris Walters    

Acres USA

October 2006 Issue

Mad Sheep: The True Story of the USDA's War on a Family Farm

By Linda Faillace Published by Chelsea Green Publishing

      Most people remember the character of Inspector Javert, the policeman in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables whose relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean makes a hash of justice, fairness and decency. Hugo's point is impossible to miss: Javert's mania for the letter of the law is a kind of madness that moves him to murder its spirit.

    The Faillace family had the misfortune of attracting their very own Javert in 1998, when Larry and Linda, who bred and raised sheep with the help of their three children, were asked to meet with a USDA functionary. They assumed it was something to do with scrapie prevention. The Faillaces had cooperated with the national effort to wipe out the brain-wasting disorder - a prion disease in the same class as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a.k.a. Mad Cow disease - when they endured years of agonizing regulatory delays while assembling their herd of rare sheep, bred from imported livestock. Taking no chances, they went the USDA one better by nudging state agriculture officials to activate Vermont's scrapie prevention program, which until then had existed only on paper.

    Linda Faillace remembers thinking cheerful thoughts about the person they were to meet, a senior staff veterinarian with the USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service named Linda Detwiler, who was known for her involvement with the sheep industry.

    "Now she was coming to see our operation, I told Larry, to congratulate us on doing such a great job: importing excellent, healthy sheep from Europe and New Zealand, getting the scrapie program up and running in Vermont, and stimulating the sheep industry, particularly the dairy sheep sector. But Larry disagreed. Something was niggling at him. 'This does not feel good,' he said."

    Larry might have suspected that no good deed goes unpunished. Nevertheless, the real topic of the meeting came as a shock. Detwiler informed the Faillaces that the USDA believed their sheep might be harboring a variant of BSE, and they would have to suspend operation immediately. The implications were dire. An infected herd would have to be destroyed, and with it would go the family's fortunes as well as their emotional attachment to animals that were never raised for slaughter. The Faillaces reminded Detwiler that no sheep anywhere in the world had ever been found carrying a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy other than scrapie; moreover, they kept detailed records of every sheep's entire lifespan which proved that the USDA's claim was not only unlikely but impossible. Detwiler said she had information she could not divulge.

    With that, the Faillaces were plunged into the American version of your basic Kafkaesque nightmare. By the time their worst fears had come to pass with the seizure of their flock early in 2001, they were lied to, spied on by federal agents, and run through a legal wringer. The USDA secured its final victory with the aid of a researcher whose laboratory was later exposed as a filthy mess, overrun with uncaged research mice.

    Larry and Linda Faillace had devoted their lives to raising happy children and fine animals. If they had been cynical people or at least schooled in bureaucratic warfare, they would have hired a fierce practitioner of Washington, D.C., blood sport the day after that first meeting, and they might have prevailed. As it was, they fought the agency with skill and persistence that must have surprised Detwiler, her unseen superiors, and the business interests that manipulate the USDA from the shadows.

    The agency had picked a fight with the wrong couple. Larry had a Ph.D. in animal physiology and Linda knew TSEs from her experience working as an assistant to a British scientist in the early '90s, when Larry taught at the University of Nottingham. They knew the horror of the British Mad Cow epidemic at first hand, they knew the USDA's safeguards against BSE were grossly inadequate, and they had every reason to believe the agency was engaged in covering its bases, to use the polite term. But they never reckoned on the malign nexus of Detwiler's personal ambition, the ethical squalor of an agency that had spent decades collaborating with the industry it was supposed to regulate, and the current bureaucratic police state. The story behind the USDA's vendetta remains untold as the Faillace's lawsuit against the agency goes into discovery. Doubtless it will confirm the pithy words of another French writer, Honor é de Balzac: "Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."

    This is an infuriating book in many respects. Although Linda Detwiler has gone on to a career consulting for fast food chains, the usual gang of idiots is still in charge at the USDA. But it is also a compelling book, because Linda Faillace never lets her anger interfere with her careful rendering of the facts. She's a born storyteller who might consider a sideline as an author of political thrillers - Mad Sheep is one of those books that makes going to sleep at a decent hour unthinkable.

    Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm, by Linda Faillace, hardcover, 352 pages. Cost $25. This book is published by Chelsea Green Publishing Company, ISBN 1-93-339209-6.