What is NAIS?

The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is a national program intended to identify specific animals in the United States and record their movement over their lifespans. It is being developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and State agencies?in cooperation with industry?to enable 48-hour traceback of the movements of any diseased or exposed animal. This will help to ensure rapid disease containment and maximum protection of America's animals. To visit the official site click here.

For this system to work every animal including alpacas will need to have a unique indentity and every set of premises a unique identity. The exact 15 digit system for animals including alpacas is yet to be dettermined.

However, the premises system is up and running so you can register your alpaca farm now.
As of today about 120,000 premises have been registered.

On the USDA web site you can find the contact details for every State. The registration process is straight forward and it took me about 2 minutes to register Mulberry Alpacas on the Oregon State web site. The premises ID is issued straight away and ours is = 0079X31.

I don't expect next stage where we identify and record the alpacas to be quite so easy...

By Adrian Stewart