Equine Health

Medicine & Husbandry

Horse Theft

Branding, tattooing the lip, and placing a microchip under the skin are all ways of permanently idnetifying your horse. How affective are they against theft? Obviously most western style ranch brands are easily visible and are fairly effective in marking a horse, although they can be altered. Other brands, such as those done with freeze branding on European type horses, can be difficult to see, and often become almost invisible as the horse ages. Also, these brands are also not specific to the owner, but rather a “symbol” of that horse’s breed.

Lip tattoos, such as those done in registered thoroughbreds, are permanent and difficult to alter, but can only be seen on examination of the mouth. In recent years people have begun to have microchips put in their horses as a means of identification. The size of a grain of rice, these chips are placed under the skin in the neck region using a very large needle and syringe type device. The chips are encoded with a registration number that can be picked up by a scanning device, and then reported to the microchip company which keeps all pertinent information in its national database.

There are several disadvantages to relying on chips as anti-theft devices. There is no way to discern if a horse has been “chipped” by looking at them. The only way to locate the chip number is with a scanner, which currently most large animal veterinary practices do not have, although it is likely that your local SPCA or animal shelter owns one for use in small animals. The other downfall is that there are several companies in the microchip business, and they have different chips and scanners that work on different frequencies. If you put a chip in your horse, will all scanners pick it up? The answer is no, not at this time. There has been a recent push to have all scanner frequencies aligned throughout the world to minimize this problem, but so far no universal chip has been produced.

At some point in the near future it is likely that there will be an accepted and universal means for horse identification which will include some type of microchip. However, one advantage to all of these methods of identification is that you can prove the identity of the horse. Often in cases of theft, if the horse is located, there can be questions as to whether this is in fact the horse that was stolen. How many sorrel horses with white socks have we all seen? How about a bay with no distinguishing marks? If you have a brand, tattoo, chip, and/or registration papers with photos you are much more likely to have your horse returned to you.