Mary Schatz asked "why is it always USDA that seems to be involved" in
investigations of ferret breeders or other animal rights instances.  That
involves a little history of the federal bureaucracy.  When the Public
Health Service began to promulgate animal care regulations for the research
conducted through the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease
Control and the Food and Drug Admninistration (and a few smaller players),
the health agency was reluctant to set up an animal inspection regulatory
authority from scratch, having never done that sort of thing.  The USDA,
however, already had an entire network of food inspectors out in the field,
even if they mostly inspected stockhouses and packing plants rather than lab
animals.
 
The FDA now has its own food inspectors, but USDA still has authority over
lab animals for all of the health research agencies.  Specifically, the
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) oversees research
animals.  I'm not entirely sure if APHIS has authority over breeders, but
again, some branch of USDA handles it.  (And by an odd quirk of evolution,
the budget for the Food and Drug Administration is actually approved along
with USDA's, when FDA is in a different government department altogether.)
It's bureaucracy.  What can I say?  Anyway, even though individual agencies
within the government may have their own animal care guidelines, by virtue
of the fact that USDA had the infrastructure to do the inspections decades
ago, it got the oversight for all animal care regulation and enforcement--
for better or for worse.
 
--Jeff Johnston ([log in to unmask])
[Posted in FML issue 1703]