Horse passports: Minimum Operating Standards (MOpS) for Passport Issuing Organisations (PIOs)

Annex 1: Unique Equine Life Number (UELN)

The UELN system

1. The UELN is the unique number given to every horse upon registration. A UELN is required to administer and manage horses within the horse industry. All UELNs should be 15 characters in length.

2. The first 6 characters of the UELN refer to the unique number assigned to the PIO database on the territory which creates the horses’ record. In Scotland these are:

PIO / Number assigned to database

• Highland Pony Society / 826031
• The Clydesdale Horse Society / 826072
• Shetland Pony Stud-Book Society / 826039
• The Eriskay Pony Society Ltd / 826024
• Eriskay Pony (Purebred) Studbook Society – Comann Each nan Eilean / 826061

3. The objective of the UELN system is designed to ensure that each horse in the world can be identified using a single reference number. However, the UELN system also enables the historic registration numbers contained in stud books of birth to remain when included within this number.

4. A full UELN should only be created when a Passport is issued and the PIOs should ensure that they keep details of the UELN number allocated to each horse passport that they issue.

The structure of a UELN

Territory Identifier

5. The Territory Identifier is a three character numeric code that identifies the territory that is issuing the passport. In the United Kingdom this will always be allocated as the numeric code from ISO-3166 territory table and will be ‘826’.

6. Horses issued with passports by another territory will start with a corresponding three character numeric from the ISO-3166 territory table e.g. ‘372’ for the Republic of Ireland. For all historic records of horses where a UELN has not been created, the UELN code for the horse will be that of the Organisation that issued the passport.

Organisation Identifier

7. The second three characters are numeric that have been assigned to uniquely identify the PIO that issued the passport on their territory.

8. For historic identification numbers of the ISBC for Thoroughbreds, character codes are used e.g. Weatherbys Thoroughbreds use “0GB”. This exception results from the ISBC adopting an alphabetic suffix to denote territory of birth in 1999. Where there is a two digit code, e.g. GB for Great Britain and FR for France, the code is preceded by a 0 – “0GB” and “0FR”.

Unique Horse Identifier

9. The last nine characters can be alphanumeric and uniquely identify a horse that is registered within a particular PIO.

10. If the internal reference of the PIO is shorter than nine alphanumeric characters, zeros may be added to the front, to pad out the horse identifier to the required nine characters.

11. If the internal reference is longer than nine characters, look at the composition of this reference and strip out any data that may be part of the identifier but is not required to uniquely identify the horse in your PIO. The unique reference used within the UELN must be exactly nine characters in length.

Full UELN

12. The following is an example of a full UELN

Further Information

13. More about Unique Equine Life Numbers can be found at www.ueln.net. This website also provides details of the UELN numbers for all approved breed societies and international sport and competition organisations.