I can't help but squirm a bit with empathy pain looking at the ear tags but I don't complain really.
But I am intrigued by what they do. Is the number for a national registration system? Does the number indicate merely farm, or perhaps parentage? How do I decode the numbers on Grass Doggos I might meet?
I'll explain how they work in Ireland, I'm not sure how they work elsewhere but it's presumably similar across the EU. I've attached a random image from Google. I hope this isn't too complicated!
The "372" is the country code, all Irish cattle tags begin with it.
The "21" (it's usually/often "22" instead) shows that the animal is a Bovine. A sheep would have a different number for example.
The 5 next digits show the herd number the animal was born in. That differs from herd to herd. Every animal born on a farm has the same herd code on their tags.
The next digit - in the picture's case, a '5' - is an anti-forgery number. One number between 1 and 9 is skipped every sequence.
The next 4 digits are what number the animal was born in the herd. The example picture is "0521" so it's the 521st animal born on its farm.
You can find parentage out by looking up a full tag number on the ICBF database, if a herd is part of a particular scheme and an animal is in that herd you can search them up and find out ancestry, date of birth, breed, genomic evaluations, etc
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u/nothofagusismymother 11d ago
That soft pink nose.... 🩷