The Associated Press
	Larry Faillace, a Vermont farmer, said his sheep were healthy, but federal officials, fearing the spread of an infection, plan to destroy them.
	Related Articles • The Natural World: Wildlife • Science/Health Forum • Join a Discussion on Wildlife

OSTON, July 17 -- Federal agriculture officials plan to seize and destroy nearly 400 Vermont sheep in the coming days, over the objections of the owners, because four of the group imported from Belgium have tested positive for a disorder that may be similar to the mad cow disease reported in Europe.

Formally called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease is not known to have ever passed from cattle to sheep, except in the laboratory. But the agricultural authorities said today that they were intent on sparing the United States the nightmare Europe has been through, and with the sheep showing definite signs of some form of disease, they said they wanted to err far on the side of caution.

"I know this is a really difficult situation for these farmers," said Andrew Solomon, a spokesman for the Department of Agriculture. "But from our perspective, this issue is about a lot more than three individual farmers. It's about safeguarding American livestock and American agriculture."

"What we've done in this instance is to act with an abundance of caution," Mr. Solomon said.

But one owner, Linda Faillace, whose family tends a flock of 120 sheep of the East Friesian breed from Belgium and makes Three Shepherds cheese from their milk, described the planned seizure as a turn toward "Gestapo tactics" based on questionable science. Her family and the other main owner, Houghton Freeman, who owns about 230 sheep, are asking the government to delay the seizures until additional tests can determine whether the sheep really had a dangerous transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or T.S.E., a family of diseases that turn the brain spongy with holes.

"If we felt these animals had T.S.E., or if we felt there was the science showing these animals have T.S.E., we would have handed them over very quietly and been done with it long ago," Ms. Faillace said.

"We're trying to help American agriculture, not hurt it. But just to have the sheep victimized by power groups and bureaucracy needs to be stopped."

Thomas Amidon, the lawyer for Mr. Freeman, said he and his client were trying to determine their rights in this situation.

"We are looking into the teeth of the full force of the U.S. government," Mr. Amidon said.

In Europe, an estimated 180,000 cows have been infected with mad cow disease since the 1980's, apparently through feed that included the rendered brains of diseased animals, and at least 59 deaths have been attributed to a human version called new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

In 1996, the European Commission imposed a worldwide ban on British beef exports. The ban was lifted in July 1999.

The Faillaces were well aware of the danger of mad cow disease when they imported their sheep from Belgium in 1996. Larry Faillace, Linda's husband, has a doctorate in animal science.

The family has also abided by a Department of Agriculture quarantine put on the sheep in 1998, selling sheep only to the federal government, which would test, then incinerate, them.

But all the tests had been negative until the most recent ones, agriculture officials say. The tests turned up positive, they say, for abnormal prions, the infectious proteins believed to cause mad cow disease.

The quick testing of the sheep cannot determine which exact disease they had, however, and it could be that they suffered from scrapie, a fatal disorder of the same family as mad cow disease that has been appearing in sheep for centuries but has not affected humans, said Linda Detwiler, senior staff veterinarian at the Department of Agriculture.

Still, Dr. Detwiler said: "We'd be concerned about scrapie as well, because it could be an atypical strain or something we don't have in this country." Scrapie, too, would mean death for the sheep, she said.

It will take two or three years to determine exactly which disease the sheep had, she said, because generations of mice infected with samples from the sheep must be followed to see what type of disease they develop and whether it turns out to be transmissible.

Dr. Detwiler noted that neither mad cow disease nor scrapie has been shown to cause infections through milk, so there would seem to be little need to worry about sheep's cheese products. And though a few of the progeny of the imported sheep were sold for meat, all were believed to have been very young, meaning they carried a smaller risk of infection, agriculture officials said.

The Belgian sheep could have caught the disease by eating contaminated feed while still in Belgium, in an area where it has appeared among cows, agriculture officials said. But Ms. Faillace said she and her husband had carefully checked the feed records for the sheep. She also questioned whether the federal tests were accurate, citing some internal contradictions and a new testing methodology.

Dr. Detwiler said the sheep's owners would be compensated for their loss, and would be paid as much as they would have received if they had sold the sheep for breeding, rather than to a slaughterhouse. The animals from Belgium produce 10 times as much milk as American sheep. But the owners object to the plan and Ms. Faillace said dozens of allies support them.

Among their allies is Tom Pringle, a frequent critic of government mad cow policy, who writes on his Website, www.mad-cow.org: "There has been a rush to judgment. The U.S.D.A. does not have its ducks in a row. This site supports U.S.D.A. in taking draconian action but not willy-nilly nor as a publicity stunt" to impress European Union regulators.

Category: 26. BSE