Branding - What You Need to Know

 A discussion on Twitter last week raised the issue of freeze branding on racehorses and some of the responses were genuinely mystifying from people that should know better, so in a bid to clarify some of what was said I will share my thoughts on the issue.

I have never ever worked on a stud and would not presume to know how staff identify horses and what processes are used in the current age to manage large numbers of horses that often look quite similar, however I will offer my thoughts on what I do know about the importance of branding from my personal experience and why it needs to stay.

Firstly there is NO welfare issue.

I have seen freeze branding take place when I was a teenager working at the late Bede Murray’s stables as he always maintained a small number of broodmares and those weanlings were branded.

It is not cruel or barbaric or any such thing and anybody that believes so is wrong.

Young thoroughbreds (and horses in general) have to go through many processes in life, learning to have their feet trimmed and shod, learning to have their teeth done, learning to accept needles for vaccinations and treatment, being broken in, wormed, scoped and x-rayed, none of these things are pleasant, branding is no worse than any of these things and happens once in their life.

The result is an identifying mark on the horse that lasts a lifetime and forever more will show his age and where he was bred, offering valuable information to his future owners for years to come and quite possibly saving his life.

The reality is horses often live into their twenties and most will not finish their days where they started, but that brand means that whoever has the horse last will know his true age and where he was born.

Horses can’t talk so they can’t tell you their history and while it is true that microchipping leads to the same information, that information requires a scanner and a stationary horse to access and the long number you get (it will look like this Microchip Number: 985100010884676 and mean nothing to anyone at face value) then needs to be typed into studbook to find out the same information you could have gotten at a glance from a brand.

A point was raised on Twitter that pets only have microchipping. Horses are not, have never been and never will be pets, they are livestock.

Quick Identification, Not Just for Thoroughbreds

During my years working at Inglis I participated in many paddock inspections of yearlings at studs where you walk into a paddock with a staff member who has a list of the horses in that paddock with their brands and markings. Sorting out the horses you need to see was not rocket science, it was easy.

If there were no brands, distinguishing between three bay colts with no white markings is going to be a tricky task.

Most breeds of horses in Australia are branded for this reason. At my farm we have seven horses, two thoroughbreds, two warmbloods, an Australian Stock Horse, an APSB pony and one warmblood / thoroughbred cross, only one of the seven has no brand.

Why do you think cars have number plates? Quick visual identification for regular people.

Something Sinister

The thing that bothered me most about the seemingly innocent raising of this issue in social media is who actually benefits if branding of racehorses was discontinued?

If racehorses were not branded they would be invisible in their post racing life, disappearing into the general horse population to either achieve and thrive as so many do in new careers, or find themselves in a bad situation, but either way their fate would go largely unrecognized, something that would no doubt appeal greatly to racing administrators in the current climate.

I think our racehorses deserve better than that.

Breeding racehorses for the purpose of a sport that has become a massive worldwide industry requires a level of responsibility that starts with branding.

Once a racehorse, always a racehorse and these horses need to be managed as long as they are alive and given a humane exit if that is their best option.

To make them invisible to the general public after they finish competing as racehorses may be seen as an attempt to potentially long term sweep the whole thing under the carpet and if that is the motivation behind this storm in a teacup, quite frankly at best it’s naïve and at worst is disgusting.