Forces Influencing Animal Identification Decisions

There are a number of forces that influence decisions about animal identification, and some of these forces are in tension with one another. As a result some prioritisation and some compromise may be necessary.

1. The industry will gain the most benefits from ease of integration, ease of use, simplicity and error removal by standardising on a small number of clearly enunciated identification schemes – in an ideal world, just one!
2. However, the ability to flexibly define identification methods to best fit the immediate purpose is also of benefit. The example of a relatively simple AB code for dairy bulls is one example of this.
3. Existing recording systems and schemes may be constrained by legislation (that may be hard or slow to change), or by the weight of existing data. For instance, moving to RFID as the only identifier would strand large amounts of historic data in industry performance recording and breed society databases, stopping this from being exchanged.
4. Like it or not, many or even most animals will eventually have more than one identifier, in the simplest case an RFID and its official visual equivalent.
5. Many embedded and field ruggedised devices are based on computer architectures from ten to twenty years ago. These devices may have slower, simpler (and perhaps power-efficient) processors, and much less memory than modern devices. For the developers of these devices, supporting Internet lookups, multiple identifier formats and validation checking is difficult or perhaps even impossible.
6. Even developers of modern Internet-based systems, with substantially more processing and memory resources and access to pre-built support systems such as XML parsers may choose to minimise complexity by only supporting a subset of identification types – and they are likely to prefer schemes that can be implemented with minimal changes.