Dr. Sonja Egan:

One of the new additional services we have tried to roll out this year to help bring down that time is to offer a lot of our services online. Owners can now register their foal online. Mr. Duggan referenced some of the procedures and steps. Specifically, a breeder or a stallion owner can lodge a cover certificate or mare declaration with us, which will initiate straight away the sending out of that foal kit to the breeder. From there, the vet will go out and chip the foal and take markings specifically on the silhouette of a horse. They will take a hair sample from the foal and send it back to us. That will initiate actual DNA testing in a laboratory. That DNA will decide where they will enter. We have five stud books, and we also issue identification documents. The outcome of the DNA analysis will decide within which stud book this animal may eligible to enter.

It is from there that we begin the production of the actual stud book. We hope the transition to genotyping will help improve the processing time for DNA. We have been told specifically by the laboratories, and our partner, that with the current technology we are leaving they can process between 1,500 and 2,000 samples per week down that chain. Between the genotyping and SNPs testing, they are looking at between 15,000 and 20,000 samples per week. The transition will take time and we are in that process at the moment. That is why we are engaging with breeders and we are grateful to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine for supporting us in this injunction. Equally, we hope that once we transition fully to SNP technology, our DNA processing times will increase, not in terms of analysis necessarily but that the volumes sent out will be much higher.