Study Finds Equine Hot Brands Difficult to Decipher

An Austrian study finds brands used in horse identification difficult to read in some instances.
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Despite increasing scientific evidence that branding foals causes the animals stress, many horse breeders still rely on this practice for herd identification. Although the debate about whether or not branding horses is humane has raged for some time, few have posed the question: How reliably can brand marks be read later in life?

Jörg Aurich, Dr.Med.Vet., PhD, and Christine Aurich, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ECAR of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria, recently addressed this issue in a study.

Brands on horses generally combine a symbol to indicate the particular breed with a two-digit number to identify the individual animal. To assess the readability of the markings, the researchers asked three experienced people to record the brands of about 250 horses participating in an equestrian tournament in Germany.

All three testers were able to recognize the breed symbols on about 90% of the animals and for about 84% of the animals the symbol was recorded correctly by all three people. However, the situation for the two-digit numbers yielded different results. While each of the three readers read the numbers correctly on about half of the horses, the correct number was recorded by all three of them for less than 40% of the animals

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