Written answers

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Animal Identification Schemes

Photo of Ruth CoppingerRuth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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239. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the measures taken by his Department to ensure that temporary identity tags on cattle are correctly recorded and the traceability of these animals are fully supervised; and the number of cases that have been identified in the years 2011, 2012, 2013 and to date in 2014 in breaches of the regulations. [35468/14]

Photo of Simon CoveneySimon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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All bovines in the State must be identified in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 1760 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 July 2000 establishing a system for the identification and registration of bovine animals and regarding the labelling of beef and beef products and repealing Council Regulation (EC) No 820/97 and S.I. No. 77 of 2009 [European Communities (Identification of Bovines Regulations 2009]. The legislation requires that all bovines must be tagged within 20 days of birth with a specific individual tag that identifies the holding, with the birth recorded on the herd register of the keeper and details of date of birth, breed, sex and dam registered on the Department’s Animal Identification and Movement (AIM) database within 7 days of tagging. If a bovine animal loses a tag, a replacement tag must be ordered immediately by the keeper.

The identification of bovines is checked at the annual TB herd test and any identification issues are addressed at this time. Any unidentified animals found at the time of testing must be tagged with a temporary tag as supplier by this Department before testing. It is the keeper’s responsibility to correlate the temporary brass tag assigned for testing purposes (via the completion of an ER96 form) with the tag number assigned to the animal on the AIM system. The test details, attributed to the temporary tag, can only be correlated to the permanent tag by the Department, following the completion by the testing practitioner of Section B of the ER96 form, certifying that the correlation between the temporary tag and the tag assigned to the animal on AIM is correct. It is acceptable for a veterinary practitioner other than the testing veterinary practitioner to certify that the animals bearing both the temporary and permanent tags are correct and therefore that the details on the ER 96 form are in order.

This Department conducts periodic checks to ensure that the ER96 form procedures are being properly implemented. Inspections are also carried out under cross compliance for the Single Farm Payment to ensure that bovines are identified correctly and that all passports are in order. Where unidentified animal are found temporary tags are inserted. The number of such temporary tags used is not recorded. Penalties may be applied to Single Farm Payments where non-compliance with identification requirements is found.

The number of animals temporarily tagged at test in the years 2011 to 2014 was as follows:

20113577
20122801
20132316
20141536

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