Press Release - Commission Regulation sets out the detailed rules for cattle inspections

Commission Regulation (EC) No 1082/2003 sets out the detailed rules for cattle inspections.

The regulation means that farms may be chosen for the following reasons:

• Late passport applications.

• No Births/Movements/Deaths reported within the last two years where 20 or more cattle present.

• Late movement/death reporting.

• Results of checks conducted in earlier years, in particular, the proper keeping of the holding register, the proper keeping of passports of the animals present in the holding and movement restrictions placed on animals.

• The existence of previous outbreaks of disease (BSE, TB & Bluetongue)

• Significant changes in comparison with situations in previous years.

The risk selection includes a small randomly selected element from the whole population as a control method.

Successful inspections are filtered out for two years before the risk selection is run, taking into account the time since the last inspection and herd size to ensure that the selection is not biased towards the largest holdings.