IRISH AND American scientists have discovered that you can identify a cow by looking it straight in the eye. During the research to develop new methods of tracing animals, they also found that cows do not have matching eyes.
Details of the research was presented this week to a science conference in Tullamore, Co Offaly.
The Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute in Northern Ireland and a US company, Optibrand Ltd, have developed a hand-held retinal imaging system for identifying individual cows.
The Annual Agricultural Forum, a joint Teagasc and UCD initiative, were told the results of trials carried out on the new device, called the "opti-reader".
They heard that blood vessels patterns formed in the womb are fixed at the time of birth, with both eyes from the same animal exhibiting different patterns.
The researchers took images of the eyes of 869 animals and in trials, came up with a 98.3 per cent accuracy rate for identifying the cattle to the tag in its ear. The outcome was more impressive when the tags were switched on 115 of the animals and the machine was set the task of identifying the cattle.
According to the results, the machine achieved a 100 per cent success rate in identifying the animals correctly. The forum was told that this system could be employed as a stand-alone technology for animal identity verification.
Of greater importance is that fact that it has the potential to improve the performance of ear-tags which are currently used for identifying cattle. Tagging cattle has limitations as they frequently fall out or are lost and current systems trace the tag, not the animal.