Horse stolen from Guildford and found in Wales - please read

I found a plait exactly like this in the mane of a pony I was looking after for a friend who was on holiday. 'Tangle' is a good word to describe it but it was made from two strands of hair twisted into 'ropes' and then tied loosely together. As you can imagine I was really worried and phoned the local police who knew nothing whatsoever about the plaiting thing, just said it was probably kids. I knew it wasn't, kids would do a proper 'pretty' plait not one that was designed to be hard to spot. Luckily nothing happened (I took the plait out and had a few sleepless nights!) but it makes you wonder how we are supposed to know about these things if even the police can't keep up to date.
And I'm so livid about the whole passport thing. DEFRA are so heavy handed in the punishments (£5000 isn't it?) for ordinary horseowners who don't have one but apparently thieves aren't subject to the same laws.
 
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So why did we all have to fork out for passports ?

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So defra know how many horses there are and where, so they can tax them. Anyone who thinks its for welfare/food chain reasons is sadly mistaken. This is just another example of the passport law farce.

So glad the horse will be reunited with its owner though.

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Ha Ha yeh right, so they know how many gypsy horses there are do they ? And I bet they all have passports, although as most of them are coloured, they could use the same one for all !! It is a complete joke
 
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, they have no facilities, they say, for checking horses that are being transported from the UK to Ireland. It would take a complicated logistical operation to unload the horses safely, find a competant person to check them

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But surely they wouldn't need to unload. You can scan a horse while it is still loaded? Scanning them takes a minute and you wouldn't need to do all horses, just enough to make the thieves think twice rather than knowing no one is going to check them.
 
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We need to put pressure on DEFRA , the government and the ferry companies to close this loophole, in my opinion it should have been done years ago.

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Agree, but how?
 
Through an HH campaign maybe?

Starsky I can see where your coming from re the issue of scanning horses while they're in a lorry or trailer, but personally I think it would be risky. I could be wrong but I thought you had to get next to and quite close to a horse with a scanner to detect a microship. (Do correct me someone if this isn't right). And if a horse is rugged, what chance of checking a freezemark without removing the rug? It can't be done in a narrow space, or perhaps it can but with difficulty. Agree with you that the system could work if lorries etc were checked at random, but it will still need for a system to be put in place. and that's what we need to start making a noise about. It would need to be carefully monitered too, policed possibly? as I feel that it's something which might be open to a fair amount of corruption.
 
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