Equine Identification Review and Update

The National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is being developed to protect the livestock industry from an outbreak of a potentially catastrophic animal disease or an attack of bio-terrorism. When fully operational, it will allow animal tracing to be completed within 48 hours of disease detection, ensuring rapid containment of the disease and protecting the industry from further harm.

In 2003, The American Horse Council organized a task force to evaluate the proposed national identification system. That task force is now the Equine Species Working Group (ESWG). The ESWG believes that it is in the best interest of the horse industry to work with those instituting NAIS to be sure that our specific concerns are understood and considered.

Federal Legislation

There have been three bills introduced in 2005 regarding Animal Identification. The National Farm Animal Identification Records Act (H.R. 1254) was introduced by Congressman Colin Peterson (D-MN) on March 10, 2005. This legislation would “amend the Animal Health Protection Act to require the establishment of electronic nationwide livestock identification system, to prevent the unauthorized release of information collected under the system, to promote an objective review of Department of Agriculture responses to livestock disease outbreaks, and for other purposes.”

Congressman Colin Peterson (D-MN) also introduced the Animal Health Protection Act Amendment (H.R. 1256) on March 10, 2005. This bill would “amend the Animal Health Protection Act to exempt certain animal identification information from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”

The Livestock Identification and Marketing Opportunities Act (H.R. 3170) was introduced on June 30, 2005 by Congressman Steve King (R-IA). The bill would “establish a Livestock Identification Board to create and implement a mandatory national livestock identification system.” Participation in this proposed system would not be mandatory for horses, though they could participate voluntarily.

These three bills were all referred to the House Committee on Agriculture.

NAIS Implementation

The first step for the implementation of the NAIS is premises registration, which is well underway. Premises, which are locations that manage or hold animals, would be identified with a unique seven-character identifier called a premises identification number. To learn how to register your premises, contact your state Department of Agriculture. The contact information can be found on the NAIS website, www.usda.gov/nais.

The next step to the NAIS implementation is animal identification. Animals will be identified with an Animal Identification Number (AIN), which is a 15 digit code with the first 3 numbers being the country code (USA – 840). Although various identification methods for horses are proposed, it is likely that microchips will ultimately be used. For more information, a microchip paper developed by the ESWG is available on their website, www.equinespeciesworkinggroup.com. This paper supplies general information about microchips and scanners, and includes the ESWG recommendation to the USDA regarding the identification of horses for purposes of the NAIS.

The final implementation step will be tracking animal movement. In August 2005, The Secretary of Agriculture announced that the movement tracking data will be a held in a private industry held database. This private database was to include all species, having all come together to form one legal entity responsible for developing and implementing the movement tracking database. This January 2006, the USDA announced that they are considering a “meta-data layer” approach, where the USDA will develop and maintain a repository that can work with several different movement-recording databases, rather than having a single database for the entire industry. With this new concept, the USDA would be able to query only the databases that contain data for specific animals that are in question. This new solution still needs to be fully evaluated before any development and implementation. Much still needs to be learned and decided upon before horses would move on to this final step of implementation.

The ESWG continues to evaluate the NAIS and work on recommendations for the USDA on how horses would fit into this identification system. More information on the ESWG can be found on their website previously mentioned.