Microchips

[Dee Grieser <frzmark@RTD.COM>]

Barney Fleming D.V.M. wrote - 

>As a avid supporter of microchipping as the best means of positive
>identification for your horse or anything for that matter, let me say go
for >it.  As of Jan 1996 the USDA approved the use in horses and in doing so
made it >a requirement to scan all horses prior to slaughter in USDA
slaughter houses.  >All of these houses have been supplied with scanners and
if not scanned and >identified then the carcuss will be condemed costing the
house $.  

None of the slaughter plants I contacted are aware of this requirement.  The
chips may have been approved by the USDA BUT they have not yet been approved
by the FDA.  Since regulations regarding a product are written during the
FDA testing procedures, there will be no regulations until the chips are
submitted for testing to prove that they are safe and effective.  The FDA is
"exercising regulatory discretion" in allowing the products to be sold for
"pet animals," including horses, without prior testing.  All the testing so
far for equines that I have seen results for has been done either by the
microchip manufacturers or in trials funded by the manufacturers, except for
one informal Canadian study <in cattle, conducted by the breeder> that
showed an approximate 50% overall failure rate.

>As for brands I believe they are a great deterent to theft but
microchipping is >the only unalterable form of positive identification.  

An electromagnetic pulse will wipe the info from the chip just as it will
wipe it from a computer's hard disk.  Much less messy than removal. 

>Horses with brands are slaughtered with no questions asked.  

Slaughter plant operators are held responsible for undocumented freeze
marked horses.  By a federal regulation that is more than 20 years old.
This is because the BLM uses freeze marking to ID the equines in their programs.

>If you do not have your horse Microchipped then do so soon.  For a very
small >fee (less than branding) you can have a means of positively
identifying your >horse!! All brands, papers and photos are duplicatiable
and alterable therefore >not positive ID.   Barney

Anyone remember reading aboout Avis Ahern in Louisiana on rec.eq?  She had
two microchipped horses stolen, around Thanksgiving 1996, if I remember
correctly.  When the horses were located by an alert person who remembered
seeing the reward posters, she had to BUY them back from the person who had
bought them at an auction - the microchips were of no use in identifying the
animals as her property - even though the state of Louisiana was promoting
their use for EIA testing ID.

Also, when a large group of Arabians were seized in a drug bust right here
in Tucson and later auctioned off, the horses that had been freeze marked
kept their registration rights, such as breeding and showing, because they
could be positively identified.  Those that had not been marked were sold as
grade horses.  I do not know if any of the animals had beeen chipped.

Dee



Dee Harris Grieser
Kryo Kinetics Associates, Inc.
'the horse ID people'
PO Box 12490
Tucson, AZ  85732
(520) 293 5448
http://www.horseweb.com/kka