The thing that realy burns my butt about this whole thing is that it was American buyers that created the demand that caused the expansion of the Canadian herd to begin with. Back before the free trade agreement, Canada exported some beef, but because of tariffs etc, we didn't produce much more than what we could use in Canada. We used to process it ourselves and ship west and east from here. Then free trade came along and the easterners started getting alot of their beef from south in the US and the US buyers showed up in the Canadian sale barns with those big American dollars and basically outbid our local packers until they shut them all down. Basically, the Americans produced teh demand that caused us to lose our packing plants and caused our production up to meet that demand. Then suddenly we became the big, bad Canadians because we are taking the American market away from teh American producers. R-Calf was looking for an excuse to shut the border down to Canadian beef long before BSE came along. This is about protectionism, not BSE.