Following the confirmation of the New World screwworm in Pecos County, the Department of Agriculture has formally delegated the containment of a flesh-devouring biological threat to the private citizens currently standing over the carcasses.
In an interagency memo circulated on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning, USDA officials outlined their strategy for managing the return of the eradicated parasite, noting that the immediate federal response to a larval mass consuming the living tissue of a warm-blooded mammal would be handled primarily by whichever tourist had just paid to shoot it on a high-fence game ranch.
According to guidance approved by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, federal intervention will remain strictly advisory. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) will rely on a robust honor system, trusting armed recreationalists to accurately diagnose and report severe myiasis before strapping the infested ungulate to a flatbed truck. The strategy reflects a broader administrative messaging effort to decentralize ecological disasters, successfully framing the discovery of a parasite that systematically digests the faces of livestock as a localized zoning issue.
While the federal government maintains comprehensive protocols for agricultural biosecurity, the day-to-day management of a rapidly multiplying, flesh-eating insect swarm is best left to the individual consumer who just harvested the host," said Arthur Wendel, the USDA's Deputy Undersecretary for Vertebrate Liquefaction.
Sources close to leadership in Austin indicated that state lawmakers are comfortable with the federal delegation of biosecurity duties, provided Washington does not attempt to impose burdensome regulations on Texas's lucrative industry of raising captive wildlife for the dual purposes of sport shooting and uncontrolled larval incubation.
By late Wednesday, the USDA had walked back portions of its initial guidance, issuing a clarifying statement to the press pool that discharging a firearm directly into a writhing mass of parasitic maggots still requires a valid small-game permit.