The first puppies and the first training session for tattooists took place on 13 Dec 1986, and for two years the system remained for GSD puppies only.Requests from other breeds and from the owners of adult dogs for access to the service resulted in the scheme being expanded to cover all dogs of any age and any breed or type including mongrel and cross breed dogs, and the system was renamed the National Dog Tattoo Register (NDTR).
The scheme grew steadily, but in 1991 The League found that the development of the scheme was,because of other breeds,no longer within its remit, and began looking for a way of handing the scheme over.On 1 Jan 1992 the system came under new management, still administered as a non-profit making service, it has grown and now consists of two offices,two full time employees and two out of office workers connected via modem to the head office at Colchester.Today over 100,000 dogs have been tattooed, and the tattoo team of 200 tattooists spread over the whole of the British Isles including S.Ireland,the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands brings the tattooing within reasonable reach of most dog owners and breeders.
The cost of tattooing is not unreasonable. For a litter of puppies the tattooing cost is £4 per puppy with an additional charge of £7 to register to register the whole litter on the database, ie a litter of five puppies would cost a total £32. Breeders that themselves carry out the transfer of ownership to the new owner earn a commission of £3 per puppy thus reducing the cost of tattooing to £1 per puppy.To tattoo and register an adult dog the cost is £12
Frequently Asked Questions 1. Do tattoos fade over a period of time?
No. This old chestnut is bandied about by those who know nothing about
the process and/or who, for reasons of their own, fear an efficient method
of identifying dogs relating them to their owners.
Ear tattooing, the
method used by the NDTR, is the most widely used canine identification
method in the world. It is a long established and well tested system.In
Europe ear tattooing has been established for thirty years, over 20
million dogs are currently ear tattooed. Ask yourself, the question "Would
the system still exist let alone be in such wide use, if it failed the
purpose for which it was intended?"
Those of you with middle
aged brothers, fathers, or other male relatives that were tattooed as
teenagers, will be aware that the tattoos are still plain to see twenty or
thirty years after they were done, well beyond the life span of a dog.In
Britain, pedigree rabbits, sheep, goats and racing greyhounds (where
identification is essential to prevent fraud in a £1.5BILLION a year
business), have relied upon ear tattoo identification for decades.
Large numbers of British breeders, the real experts in dogs, use the NDTR
ear tattoo system voluntarily and breeders do not waste money on services
that do not work. A properly applied tattoo lasts the lifetime of the dog.
2. Is Tattooing a painful process?
The process is uncomfortable. If I said the process was completely pain
free I would therefore be a charlatan and/or a liar. I hope I am neither.
The discomfort of tattooing equates with ear piercing and is much less
unpleasant than some veterinary processes.
Ear tattooing is achieved
by briefly clamping the instrument carrying the number onto the dogs ear.
This takes about three seconds. The next stage is the application of the
dye which is rubbed into the tiny pricks in the skin.Ear piercing, indeed
all body piercing is done to satisfy fashion and vanity. An ear tattoo may
save your dog's life. Over a thousand lost or stolen dogs have via the ear
tattoo been returned to their owners. Many of these would otherwise have
lost their lives by being put down as unidentified strays.
3 Can Tattoos be tampered with?
Anyone one can tamper with virtually anything, indeed gas/electricity
meters are prime targets for those who think they can get away with it.
The NDTR recognised this possibility from the beginning and has built an
anti-tamper mechanism into the system, but let us look at two of the most
mooted methods of tampering.
a. The ear can be cut off.
b. The
tattoo number can be altered.
Apart from the fact that it would take
a particularly evil character to cut a dogs ear off, it would, because the
number is deep in the ear, be unlikely to remove all of the number, and
the part remaining would on most occasions be sufficient, using the NDTR
computer system, to trace the culprit.The reason for cutting off the ear
would be if the dog had been stolen,and dogs are stolen either for resale
or because the thief wants the dog.
I put it to you that there is a
very limited market for one eared dogs. Would you buy a dog with one ear?
If someone has stolen the dog for themselves, they have stolen the dog
because they like it, they are therefore unlikely to mar the dog by
removing an ear. Certainly we have never had a report of ear removal in
this country and in my frequent communications with European systems this
possibility has never been mentioned.Thieves are far more likely to steal
a non-tattooed dog that cannot be identified. This is confirmed by the
number of times that stolen tattooed dogs have been recovered following
publication that the stolen animal carried a tattoo mark.
Bear in
mind that the owner of a stolen dog is under a perpetual threat of
discovery. They cannot take the dog to the vet nor can they put it in
boarding kennels. We have indeed recovered dogs months after they were
stolen via these two sources.Attempts to alter the tattoo number are
doomed to fail for a number of reasons.
a. The tattoo dye changes
colour from green to a turquoise/blue as it ages, thus subsequent
alterations would show as a different shade.
b. It has been suggested
that individual numbers or letters could be changed, a "B" to an
"8" or a "3" to an "8".
The format of
the tattoo number does not allow numbers in a location normally occupied
by a letter, thus if an 8 were changed to B or vice versa the change
symbol would be in the wrong location and thus be an obvious forgery.The
number 3 used in the tattoo number is a flat topped three and cannot be
changed to an 8.
It has been suggested that the tattoo could be
easily removed. The removing tattoos is a very expensive and tricky
operation and involves the use of laser equipment. The people who do this
work are professionals and would be unlikely to do the task without good
reason and unlikely to risk a professional reputation to assist the seedy
activities of a dog thief.
4. Are tattoos widely recognised as a viable means of identification.
As mentioned earlier, tattooing is the most widely used system in the
world. In many countries, Europe for instance, are government recognised.
Indeed the governments of a number of the countries demand that imported
dogs are tattooed prior to importation. The NDTR has tattooed several
hundred dogs for export to all of these countries.
On the level of the
recognition of ear tattooing in Britain, judge for yourself.Battersea Dogs
Home, the RSPCA, the NCDL, and many other canine welfare organisations use
the system. Dog wardens, local authorities and the police also use the
system regularly. Any finder of a tattooed dog is able to ring the NDTR
direct and on most occasions the owner is informed or where to find their
dog within minutes.
Interpol, the Office of Fair Trading, and Customs
and Excise have also used the scheme. The system has been used by the law
courts to identify dogs when ownership has been disputed, and in one case
the court ordered dogs to be ear tattooed.The metropolitan Police and a
number of other police forces use the NDTR system to identify their police
dogs.
We have on a number of occasions recovered dogs that were lost
abroad ( Holland, Cyprus, New Zealand), and on frequent occasions have
been used as an information source to identify the source of foreign
tattoo numbers, in addition seven other countries use ear tattoo schemes
modelled on our system.
