Cattle

Two show pigs scuffled. Children petted cattle with European and Asian pedigrees. And an 11-year-old, dark bay thoroughbred lived up to her name. With Better Than Ever, Jessica Ganske won her final grand champion prize in the English fitting and showing division yesterday at the Carroll County 4-H/FFA Fair in Westminster. "She's definitely into blue ribbons," Ganske, who at 18 has reached the end of her 4-H years, said of her horse. "This is our fourth year together, and she's won fitting and showing every year for me."

If it had been human, it would have been charged with assault and theft. But the emu that led Cpl. Robert C. Cromwell on an hour-long chase through a Mount Airy neighborhood of freshly built, single-family homes made a clean getaway - with a pack of the officer's Marlboro Lights in its beak. "It looked like a big roadrunner, and it ran like one, too," recalled Cromwell, an officer with the Carroll County Sheriff's Office. Law enforcement officers in rural and newly suburbanized places in the Baltimore area regularly do double duty as cowboys and zookeepers.

CHICAGO - Cattle futures in Chicago had their biggest decline in six months yesterday in the wake of a government announcement late Friday that a mad-cow screening test may have indicated the second case of the disease since December. The test has yet to be confirmed. The Department of Agriculture said an animal tested "inconclusive" for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, under an expanded screening program that began June 1. The carcass was sent to the department's National Veterinary Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, for additional tests.

The Carroll County Agriculture Center's new arena will open late next month when it is host of the weeklong 4-H/FAA Fair, ending a $4.3 million construction project that was hampered by inclement weather and delayed by work order changes. A use-and-occupancy permit was issued in late April, but minor detail work, including spot painting and installing small parts, and cleanup of the 52,500- square-foot arena in Westminster need to be completed, said Lawrence E. Meeks, president of the center's board.

James Lee, who suffers from diabetes and heart disease, used to dodge his doctor's orders not to eat red meat. He had always loved a good beefsteak and could not give it up. Then the Howard County man found salvation in the form of a wild, shaggy-haired bison. With his doctor's blessing, Lee became one of a growing number of Americans who eat bison as an alternative to beef. It's a red meat with one-third the fat of beef, less cholesterol and more iron. "It keeps me in very good health," said Lee, 76. Once a week, he grills himself a bison steak, seasoned only with a little vinegar.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture refused yesterday to allow a Kansas beef producer to test all its cattle for mad cow disease, saying such sweeping tests were "not scientifically warranted." The exporter, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to use newly approved rapid tests so it could resume selling its fat-marbled Black Angus beef to Japan, which banned American beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington state in December tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.

Frank Gosman's nightclubs are gone, but he found a new home for the country music show he started three decades ago: his Clarksville barn. Every Sunday afternoon, Gosman opens his doors to the Country Showcase America Jamboree, a show in the style of the Grand Ole Opry. Gosman, as master of ceremonies, tells stories, offers chatty comments and calls up singers from the audience to perform traditional country tunes with backup from a five-piece band. Halfway through, everyone takes a break for a supper brought in by a participant.

WASHINGTON - Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman told a House committee yesterday that the government has responded effectively to an outbreak of mad cow disease and is working hard to persuade trading partners to reopen markets to U.S. beef. "U.S. beef is safe for consumers in the United States and around the world, and we are urging our trading partners to base their decisions on science," Veneman told the House Agriculture Committee. At the same time, congressional critics prepared legislation that would prohibit lame or injured cattle from being slaughtered for human consumption.

THE NEW YEAR started off with a grind, as I made my own hamburger. My home-ground burger did not get rave reviews from my family. "Too tough," said one son who, as kids do, came home from college for the holidays and proceeded to eat us out of house and home. "Too stringy," chimed in his older brother, also home from college for the holidays, and also a chowhound. My grind-your-own effort was fueled in part by culinary curiosity and in part by the recent mad-cow scare. I wondered if freshly ground meat would taste better than store-bought hamburger.

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. - The cow kept losing her ear tag. Again and again, she would rub against a fence or a tree until the plastic tag, about the size of an index card, fell off. So, rancher David Watson had to improvise when tracking her in his booklet of Herd Production Records. "Big Red," he wrote in the space set aside for her tag number. Then he drew a sketch of the crescent-shaped birthmark on her face. In much of the country, that is as scientific as cattle identification gets. Millions of wild salmon have microchips implanted in their bellies so biologists can track the fish as they navigate hydroelectric dams.