Richelieu EID Exposes Profound Shortcomings Of Food Chain

Posted on May 12, 2015 by heatherclemenceau

Written by: Heather Clemenceau

We picked up a copy of the EID currently being used at the Ontario Livestock Exchange (OLEX) in Waterloo, Ontario. For a document that supposedly exerts “quality control” over horsemeat, notice that there are no CFIA headers or logos; it is however, “branded” with the name Richelieu and replete with embarrassing spelling errors and typos in both English and French.

It is missing a fair bit of information that is present on the sample EID in the CFIA Meat Hygiene Manual for equines as well, including an indicator of the primary use of the horse (recreation/companion animal/ pleasure riding, breeding, ranch/farm work, public work, private industry work, performance/sport/show, racing, rodeo, urine production, food production.) I guess they don’t want high risk animals to be unnecessarily flagged for drugs. Note that on the first page, Richelieu refers to the document itself, not unironically, as “DIE.” It is due to moments like these perhaps, that humorists were born.