The Eyes Have It

If someone wanted to take my horses they could just walk up, open the gate, and walk off with them.  I don't ever worry about that though.  Mostly because they would have a hard time getting them off of the property (good luck getting them in a trailer without a fuss!), but also they are just your average backyard horses.  Priceless to me but no one else.   If they were worth tens of thousands of dollars then I might be a little more concerned about having a means of identifying that they were mine.

Racing is a big money industry and consequently horses do get stolen.  Most breeds of race horses in North America are required to have a lip tattoo before their first race for ID purposes. Ouch!

Branding is another means of easy ID.  Horses can be either hot branded or freeze branded. Neither one seems like much fun to me!
Most people are familiar was hot branding from old cowboy movies.

Hot Branding

 A branding iron is heated red hot and applied to the skin long enough to create a permanent, hairless mark. Some breed associations require hot branding for registration.

Trakehner Hot Brand

Holsteiner Hot Brand

 Freeze branding is done by cooling the branding iron with liquid nitrogen.  The branding site is shaved to get better contact with the skin and the area soaked with alcohol before the iron is applied for several seconds.  This process damages the pigment in the hair cells and the hair on a dark colored horse will become white.

Freeze brand  on a dark colored horse

For light colored horses the iron is held in place slightly longer to eliminate the hair follicle all together and the dark skin will show through.   This video shows the process:

It is supposedly less painful to the horse (this horse doesn't seem to mind), but anyone who has had liquid nitrogen burn their skin knows that it is painful after the fact.

I recently read an article about a new type of identification called eye D  which involves simply taking a picture of the horse's eye with a special camera.  The pictures undergo computer analysis that focuses on the contours of the corpora nigra (the brown globby stuff) in the iris which are as unique as fingerprints. 

Corpora Nigra

The horse's information and eye scan are stored in a database and can be retrieved at any time, similar to micro-chipping dogs and cats. This is so much less invasive than anything else that in currently being used to identify our horsey friends.  I hope this technology takes off!