The Accidental Smallholder Forum

Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: certain-death on December 12, 2018, 11:34:56 pm

Title: Understanding Tags help
Post by: certain-death on December 12, 2018, 11:34:56 pm

Hi all,

Looking for a little clarification on tagging goats and sheep in Scotland. It's the first time we've ordered tags and I'm getting confused and finding it hard to get info answering my questions.

Is our UK herd/flock number the same for goats and sheep ? (UK0 XXXXXX)

Do we start the id part of the tag at 00001 independently for each species or do we just count up mixing the species

For example is it:

Goat 1 - 00001    Sheep 1 - 00001
Goat 2 - 00002    Sheep 2 - 00002
Goat 3 - 00003    Sheep 3 - 00003 etc

or would it be:

Goat 1 - 00001
Goat 2 - 00002
Sheep 1 - 00003
Goat 3 - 00004
Sheep 2 - 00005
Sheep 3 - 00006 etc

I also assume the numbers should relate to age oldest first in either scenario?

Any help would be appreciated. Got a few goats ready to tag and more sheep/ goats due in the spring so want to know if I should batch buy a load of EID and Visual tags.

Thanks

Ian

Title: Re: Understanding Tags help
Post by: bj_cardiff on December 13, 2018, 07:10:58 am

For the purpose of Tagging sheep and goats are the same.

So if you tagged 10 sheep and 5 goats this year you'd tag them 0001-15, it doesn't matter what species. The numbers are centrally generated/held by the Eid system and they issue them in sequence. If you order Eid slaughter tags that do not have a visual number they will have an (internal) Eid number, so if your number sequence suddenly jumps by 20, that is the reason why.

Title: Re: Understanding Tags help
Post by: Anke on December 13, 2018, 07:13:18 am

Yep, I have only one herd number for both, and just whichever tag comes next for whoever needs tagging. On movement forms etc you will have to tick which species it si anyway - goat or sheep. It's a bit insane, but hey...