Elodie, while out on a walk today through a field occupied by ponies, we read the notice attached to the gate exhorting us to please be sure we'd closed it properly behind us as the ponies had a habitat of escaping. My father then said confidently that probably they were microchipped in order to be tracked/identified, because if you can microchip dogs and cats surely you can microchip a whole equine. This seemed Wrong to me, so I must ask - are horses and ponies electronically tagged in some way?!
As of 2020 in England and 2021 in Scotland and Wales, all horses, ponies and donkeys are legally required to be microchipped! (Northern Ireland had a different earlier law, influenced by the RoI being the PLANETARY HEADQUARTERS OF BARCODED HORSES.) It’s unclear how many equines have actually been tagged as a result. After all, all British dogs are legally supposed to be microchipped - and a lot of them aren’t.
Going back to the history of horse racing, it used to be much easier to swap racehorses around - for example, the phrase “dead ringer” means a fast racehorse substituted for an identical slow one to win races (allowing the owner to gamble at the slow horse’s price, and grab lots of cash against the odds). In our own lifetimes, racehorses were categorised with lengthy paper documents, going to great lengths to differentiate mostly-identical horses by including things like the patterns formed by the whorls of hair on their bodies, which would be described and drawn carefully onto a printed outline of a horse. American racehorses famously had tattooed serial numbers on the inside of their lip, but just as famously would still be open to a lot of fraud.
Ireland, with its historical obsession with Thoroughbreds, was the first in the world to develop and adopt equine microchips and connect them to e-passports for racehorses. It wasn’t about them getting lost - it’s because a racehorse’s identity is sacrosanct, and important to confirm constantly. For the sport that essentially invented things like ‘pedigree’ and ‘sport stats’ and ‘giant public datasets of both thereof,’ this seemed like a genius idea - rather than messing about counting the cowlicks on identical brown horses, the Thoroughbred racing industry could beep them with checkout scanners!
But it was the 90s, and nobody else was quite as organised in their obsession, so Irish racehorses were trotting around the planet for decades, with these startlingly sophisticated chips embedded in their necks, before everyone else warmed up to the idea.Today, racehorses get scanned before and after races, and it’s all very normalised. It spread outwards from there.
In the late 10s, the RSPCA, complaining heavily about dealing with unidentifiable dumped horses in the UK, pushed for a law to microchip the entire equine population. It’s unclear if this intervention will truly affect the fate of neglected and abandoned horses, as the demographic who dutifully pay for and register their horse for a microchip are possibly less likely to go “actually, changed my mind, I’d rather abandon this identifiable animal in a parking lot.” But there it is: those ponies probably WERE chipped.
Microchipping does relatively little helpful work for horses that have escaped. A lost pony is likely to be recovered in the normal way, with lots of chaos and admin. It will be found because someone caught it and started screaming “whose pony is this,” and it will be identified by the owner sprinting up shouting “that’s my pony.” It’s helpful to confirm the identity, especially when authorities get involved, but microchips don’t realistically prevent theft, escape or loss.
Finally, the microchips used are NOT homing devices, GPS locators or AirTags. They’re just a fancy serial number with the horse’s identity on it. You can tell your dad that! 😁
Thank you for this! Glad you saw ponies!
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