British Eventing is encouraging its members, as responsible horse owners, to help ensure greater data accuracy, traceability and biosecurity of the national equine herd by making sure their equines are listed on the Central Equine Database as a requirement of our horse registration process from 1 January 2022.
It is a requirement by law that all equines living in the UK are registered on the CED, which currently contain over 1.5 million records. The CED is designed to protect all British equines and their owners by providing the national core data that underpins essential services, such as equine lifetime traceability, biosecurity, disease surveillance and control, food chain security, animal welfare, fraud prevention and border security. Members can check if their horses are already listed by using the National ChipChecker – if you horse appears when searched, it’s got a record. Most horses with a UK passport and microchip should be listed as the PIO will have passed the info over to the CED.
We’re also strongly recommending that members sign up to Equine Register’s Digital Stable to facilitate this process and ensure your records are correct and up to date. This also helps to provide more effective traceability and bio-security measures to protect horse welfare. The Digital Stable provides a secure link to the Central Equine Database (CED), supplied and managed by the Equine Register on behalf of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Members will be able to create their ‘Digital Stable’, which will show the data held on the CED about them and all the horses officially recorded as being owned by them.
As well as the data held, the Digital Stable enables users to record the location of their owned equines and their vaccination status (both current and historic). This information supports traceability and biosecurity protecting you and your horses from infectious diseases through live targeted national disease alerts that are relevant.
To get started, members simply need to create a free account online. For user safety, this process requires verification of identity, using the same state-of-the-art secure digital verification systems used by banks, governments and the NHS. This protects the users and their equine data from criminals who might try to impersonate them online to make fraudulent claims.
The secure ID verification process only happens once as part of the registration process. Please note that this data is only used to verify your identity and as soon as the process is completed, the information supplied is deleted and not stored.
Once sign up with the Digital Stable has been completed, users will be invited to download the free Digital Stable App to your mobile phone, where owned equine information will be automatically available as a secure online record, referred to as ‘digital passport/smartcard’. This Smartcard can then be checked at BE venues and events to underpin biosecurity and help protect competitors and their equines when they compete.
The need for accurate national data was highlighted by the Equine Influenza outbreak in 2019, which affected so many BE competitions, as well as the Equine Herpes outbreak in Europe at the beginning of last season. The use of Equine Register’s systems by BE Members will help keep BE competitions, competitors and equines safe and play an important role in the protection of all UK equines.
British Eventing’s Chief Executive Helen West said, “As a sport, it is so important that we show our support for the Central Equestrian Database and Equine Register. Ensuring that our horses are registered is crucial to safeguarding the future of the national herd, as well as protecting the wellbeing of our own horses and fulfilling our legal obligations as horse owners.
“Together with our colleagues at BD and BS, the Olympic Equestrian disciplines are leading the way forward by requiring registration as part of our horse registration process. The requirement came into place at the beginning of last month however we will be allowing members plenty of time to adapt to the new process. We thank our members for their support with this vital step for the welfare of equines in Britain.”
To help members learn more about the CED, assist with the registration process and why you should create your own Digital Stable, BE has produced a helpful information sheet with FAQs:
