AS Horse Care Ireland (HCI) highlighted a paperwork issue with an equine passport, it’s emerged that Dublin firm IdentiGEN has secured €1.8m in funding to develop DNA identification in meat traceability systems.
Chairman of HCI, John Joe Fitzpatrick, who operates the EU-approved horse abbatoir at Straffan, expressed concern over equine paperwork after coming across one live horse mistakenly already recorded as dead at the time on the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s official AIMS (Animal Information Management System).
John Joe Fitzpatrick said: “On Monday, February 12th last, six horses arrived at Straffan for slaughter and their passport details entered into the AIMS system for clearance. One showed up as excluded from the food chain and AIMS advised us to contact the PIO (passport-issuing authority), in this case the Irish Horse Board. They told me they would correct the information they had sent to AIMS on this horse.
“On Wednesday, February 14th, the paperwork for these horses was checked into the system again. Equine Tag/UELN No: 372414020193740 showed up on the AIMS system as Dead with an Exit Date of 17/11/16. It was a grey male horse (ISH), born on 03/06/2016 and the Registration Date was down as 16/11/16. I went back to the HSI offices in Naas and spoke to senior staff there about the issue. An email was sent from HSI offices to AIMS correcting the information stored in the Central Equine Database on this animal. I went back to the factory and checked the status of this animal again, which now showed up on the AIMS system as Alive. The horse was subsequently slaughtered in Straffan,” added Fitzpatrick.
IMMEDIATE ACTION
Assistant Breeding Director of Horse Sport Ireland, Michael Dempsey, said: “During the manual inputing of the registration data of this equine, it was inadvertently recorded as dead. All registration data is uploaded and updated to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s AIMS database on a daily basis. Prior to postage of the passport to the keeper, and as part of a routine quality control check, the error was identified and corrected by ISH Studbook and this correction was included in the update to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in January 2017.
“In February 2019, it was brought to the attention of ISH Studbook that the equine was incorrectly recorded on the AIMS database as ‘dead’. The ISH Studbook staff immediately contacted the Department of Agriculture in order that the error be rectified, in the DAFM Database.
“Horse Sport Ireland process in excess of 10,000 registrations annually and, like any manual data inputing process, especially when dealing with high volumes of registrations, a human error can be made. HSI has confidence in the ability of the well-trained staff in the Registration Unit and we regularly review procedures in order to identify and minimise potential errors to the database. In fact, the error as noted was identified and remedied as part of routine quality control procedures,” said Dempsey.
DNA PROJECT
IdentiGEN has secured €1.8m in funding to develop DNA identification in meat traceability systems. The Beyond Food Labelling project takes DNA samples from animals at slaughter, making it possible to link all meat products to the animal of origin. Currently Irish traceability systems operate through the use of labels and record-keeping.
“We know from major high profile issues such as the horsemeat scandal and the pig meat dioxin crisis that these systems are deficient,” IdentiGEN managing director Ciaran Meghen told the Irish Farmers Journal this week.