Dr. Sonja Egan:

Specifically on the funding that we are in receipt of from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, we are making a lot of strides towards directly impacting and evaluating traceability and indirectly doing that. Most specifically, we have begun a very significant project with this funding on changing over how we analyse horses' DNA. That is specifically replicating what we are currently doing within the bovine and ovine sector. It is called snip DNA analysis. Straight away, we are looking at the gold standard of animal testing. That helps us with traceability, and also through our studbooks for passporting and parentage verification. There is an element of health monitoring within that as well, which is really valuable. We have also begun to bring on board Bio-Thermo chips within our studbook groups. These microchips allow us to identify the horse's temperature non-invasively at the neck. That allows our breeders to monitor the animal's temperature over time. It helps with things like biosecurity, and it also helps from a welfare perspective. If an inspector is required to go out and check an animal, they can already detect the temperature. Of course, in the future we would like to roll this out over all of our microchipping.

Equally, we also have the statutory change of ownership regulations in this country. Within our organisation, is if anyone is in receipt of funds or specific schemes the animal has to be in the correct ownership. Therefore, we can trace the owner, the keeper and the equine premises number, which is a regulatory requirement within this country. We hope that all of these things together will help improve the traceability of animals in our studbooks and within the breeding and production sector in Ireland.