Okay. Thank you. We have our specialist here, so....
Thanks very much for being here. I will try to be quick in order to give you time to answer questions.
My first question deals with the importation of horses for slaughter. It's my understanding that there's a list of drugs, such as phenylbutazone and nitrofurazone, that something like 96% of horses in the United States take--in addition to many others. Any of these drugs, according to the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, are banned in terms of human consumption because of their serious and lethal idiosyncratic effects, adverse effects, on humans. In other words, if they're administered once, there's no way, ever, that animal could enter the food chain.
So if in fact roughly 96% of horses in the United States use banned substances, how can we ensure that these horses do not enter the food chain?
The other thing is that there's a form that folks have to fill out now that asks if any drugs or vaccines have been administered during the shortest time of the following three periods: since January 31, 2010; the last 180 days; or during the time you owned the animal. Theoretically, that could mean somebody could get a horse and have that horse for a day and say that no drugs have been administered.
In terms of the drugs that are permissible with a quarantine, how can we monitor that animals can stay in quarantine for six months? And how can this be manageable in feedlots where they're then not allowed to have any drugs? Would they or would they not be susceptible to diseases such as strangles?
Those are my questions. I have some documents, from the New Holland plant in Pennsylvania, that shows that basically most owners have signed and just put an address and a signature; they haven't checked the boxes. It's really sloppily done. It makes a mockery of the forms that we have given them.
I'll stop there and let Malcolm continue with a couple of questions.