In the early 2000s, a northern Arizona cattle rancher found something on his land no rancher wants to see: dead cattle.

“A rancher brought cow-calf pairs down from the mountains. By the next morning, cattle were dead and dying; ultimately the toll was 138 cows and calves,” said Debbie Reed, a University of Arizona Cooperative Extension program coordinator who works with the Arizona Livestock Incident Response Team (ALIRT).

The rancher reached out to the state veterinarian’s office, the sheriff’s office, and University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, unsure whether the deaths might be the result of a disease event or a possible crime.

The case was especially alarming, because it happened on the heels of a European outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that devastated the livestock industry there, as well as 9/11, which brought up concerns of bioagroterrorism, Reed said.

In the northern Arizona case, the investigation proceeded through multiple agencies. Cattle were buried before necropsies could be performed, test results were distributed through multiple channels, and the cause of the cattle deaths was never determined.

“The key players in that event came together afterward and said, ‘We need a better plan. We need a definite path if this happens again that ensures everybody is communicating and knows what’s going on,’” Reed said.

The result was the Arizona Livestock Incident Response Team, a collaboration of dozens of experts from several government and private organizations designed to respond quickly and protect individual producers and the statewide livestock industry from invasive species, foreign diseases, bioterrorism or other emerging environmental threats to livestock.

The program’s work is supported in part by dedicated state funding established through collaboration between the Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association and state legislators. Those funds help cover the costs of investigations, diagnostic testing and responder travel, as well as annual trainings, response equipment and educational resources such as BOLOs, surveillance kits and producer publications.

Three-legged stool

The ALIRT program is a three-legged stool, said Betsy Greene, the Extension equine specialist and professor in the U of A School of Animal and Comparative Biomedical Sciences who leads the Extension leg of the team.

Partners include Cooperative Extension, the Arizona Department of Agriculture (AZDA) and the Arizona Cattle Growers Association. When a response is triggered by the discovery of an unusual case of sick or dead livestock, the team acts quickly, often within hours, to start gathering information, Greene said.

Ranchers usually work with their herd veterinarians, who contact the state veterinarian to determine if ALIRT needs to investigate. If they do, then an ALIRT first responder veterinarian will examine the animals and collect tissue and fluids, as well as potential plant, water and other environmental samples.

“Cooperative Extension partners come in and look at the environment, what's been grazed on, if there are poisonous plants there, and the animals’ management system. The cases can be anything from toxic plants to disease to licking lead paint cans,” Greene said.

Added support comes from the Arizona Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, housed in the University of Arizona College of Veterinary Medicine, where tissue samples are analyzed. That lab is a member of the USDA National Animal Health Laboratory Network (NAHLN) and the Food and Drug Administration Veterinary Laboratory Investigation and Response Network.

When AZVDL needs to run a test not in their portfolio, samples go from there to other labs, Greene said.

“The benefit of having all samples go to the diagnostic lab is that they coordinate all testing. They know exactly where each sample went and when they should expect results back. Then everything is compiled at the diagnostic lab, and it all gets put in the same file,” she said.

Officials from the Arizona Game and Fish Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can also get involved, if there is any risk to wildlife or transmission from wildlife to domestic livestock. Even the FBI has attended and presented at ALIRT trainings, as an ALIRT case may involve criminal investigations in which chain-of-custody for evidence is critical.

Be On the Lookout

The team began creating short, understandable bulletins called BOLOs (Be On the Look Out) to inform the livestock community of emerging threats. Those reports, often produced within days of an incident, are vetted by Extension faculty, content experts and the AZDA. Recent examples include New World screwworm, equine herpesvirus, and the emergence of toxic plants like common cocklebur and pigweed on Arizona rangelands.

The BOLOs streamline communication and make sure everyone is on the same page, Greene said.

“Instead of five different groups doing five different publications, we're able to do one publication as a group and get it out fast,” she said.

A rapid, coordinated response

When an issue is reported, the ALIRT Executive Committee—comprising representatives from Extension, the State Veterinarian’s Office, and the cattle growers—determines the appropriate course of action. Depending on the circumstances, ALIRT may issue a response or decide that no action is warranted.

If an ALIRT response is initiated, a veterinarian and Extension professional work together to investigate the reported animal health concern and gather relevant information. Findings are then distributed through an email network of more than 30 trained responders, including veterinarians, Extension agents and specialists, state and federal agriculture agency personnel, and other key partners, enabling rapid communication and coordinated action.

Extension Livestock Agent Ashley Wright is an ALIRT first responder. Sometimes ranchers contact her directly, because they know her as an ag agent and know she is part of the ALIRT, she said.

Wright starts her investigation with a visit to the site to examine the environment and ask about producers’ practices.

“A lot of times, producers are a little bit more willing to talk to me about their management practices than they might be a veterinarian,” she said.

One recent case was resolved after investigators discovered that evaporation had concentrated salts in a cattle watering trough to toxic levels. Simply replacing the water corrected the problem.

Not all incidents are so straightforward, however. A foreign animal disease, for example, could have significant consequences for the livestock industry. In such cases, rapid detection is critical so affected herds can be identified and quarantined before the disease has an opportunity to spread, Wright explained.

One size does not fit all

Each ALIRT case evolves differently based on circumstances. Some cases, like a 2021 case in Santa Cruz County in which cattle ingested remnants of lead-based paint, are highly localized, with the response limited to a single ranch.

When Wright visited the site to investigate, her initial suspicion was that toxic plants might be responsible for the cattle deaths.

“But then I kind of stumbled into an old homestead and found cans of lead-based paint that had clearly been licked and spilled. I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is our smoking gun.’ Then some blood tests from the cows that were affected but not dead confirmed that they had elevated levels of lead,” she said.

Other cases, such as New World screwworm, can affect the entire nation and require a broader response that may include AZDA or USDA quarantines or restrictions on livestock movement, Greene said.

New World screwworm was recently detected in the United States for the first time in more than 50 years. The fly, whose flesh-eating larvae bore into victims’ flesh through open wounds, had been eliminated in the U.S. and Mexico but has recently been working its way north again.

USDA-APHIS serves as the federal lead for New World screwworm response, overseeing national surveillance, data collection, regulatory coordination and eradication planning. The Arizona Department of Agriculture (AZDA) supports these efforts by coordinating the state’s surveillance and response activities, including field investigations, producer outreach, and the implementation of quarantines or movement restrictions as needed.

University and Extension partners working through and alongside ALIRT are a big part of that response, providing education materials, workshops, trainings and free sampling kits to livestock producers to support early detection and reporting of suspected cases.

Not for everyday problems

The ALIRT program is not intended to address minor issues, which should be managed directly between producers and their veterinarians.

Wright said the program is intended to focus on significant mortality events, rather than isolated or routine losses. A quick response is important, partly because at the start, no one knows what the problem is. The quicker the team figures out what is affecting the livestock, the quicker they can implement biosecurity procedures to keep it from spreading, she said.

Wright stressed the importance of anonymity in both the ALIRT cases and the BOLOs. Ranchers and specific properties are not identified when information about toxic plants or animal diseases is shared, she said.

“We can protect the entire industry without outing anybody in what happened,” Wright said.

The private ALIRT Responder email list is important to the problem-solving because it gets so many people involved, she said.

“Test results get sent out so that any responder can weigh in and say, ‘Hey, I've seen this issue before,’” Wright said. “It becomes a big game of Clue, and we all help narrow down what might be happening as quickly as possible, because we have so many people working on it from different angles.”

Veterinarians involved from the start

Madelyn Ramirez is a private veterinarian in Kingman who sits on the ALIRT steering committee. She has volunteered with ALIRT for eight years. When a veterinarian responds to a case, they cast a broad net, Ramirez said.

“We first try to secure the scene, because ALIRT could be all sorts of different things. It could be a crime scene, because they were shot or poisoned by someone, or it could be a virus or bacteria that's contagious,” she said.

If a rancher reports several cows dying over weeks, the response might be less urgent than if 10 cows die suddenly overnight, Ramirez said.

“If it sounds really bad, then everybody's going to drop what they're doing to come help,” she said.

The system offers a “think tank” to the state livestock industry, bringing together far more knowledge than any one rancher or veterinarian could offer, Ramirez said.

“ALIRT provide excellent collaboration of manpower, brainpower and resources that can help us respond to any threats to the livestock industry. It also provides reassurance for the ranchers, kind of a sigh of relief or understanding that somebody has their back,” she said.

Collaboration is at the heart of ALIRT’s success, said Devon Kartchner, an assistant state veterinarian and ALIRT first responder. The system brings a lot of people to the table but doesn’t replace routine care, he said.

“I think it's a great response tool, but it does not at all replace the value of routine care and routine, good management,” Kartchner said.

A foundation of relationships

The ALIRT system is a good example of how Cooperative Extension supports Arizona agriculture with training and relationship building, Greene said.

Extension organizes the trainings and has created many resources which have trained scores of producers, Extension agents and specialists, meat inspectors, and representatives from state and federal wildlife agencies on how to recognize and deal with New World screwworm, locoweed, pigweed, avian influenza and other threats.

Those connections are vital to protecting the Arizona livestock industry, Greene said.

“Relationship building while we're training makes the ALIRT program so much more effective. The fact that people know each other makes things work so much smoother on all of this and protects the Arizona livestock industry.”

To learn more about the Arizona Livestock Incident Response team, see our ALIRT web page.