Back in April, the Jockey Club introduced a free tattoo identification service to help owners identify tattooed but unknown Thoroughbreds. In the past this service cost $35. The response was overwhelming. More than 14,000 people have logged into The Jockey Club’s Interactive Registration platform to look up their horse’s tattoos and an additional 1,700 owners emailed with requests for help reading the tattoo.

To help people who can’t read their horse’s tattoos The Jockey Club announced July 1 that it has enhanced its free Tattoo Identification Services by adding access to its markings database to the tattoo research module.

The response was extraordinary with more than 1,700 requests for tattoo identification assistance received via e-mail since April 15 and close to 14,000 tattoo lookups performed directly by customers using The Jockey Club’s Interactive Registration™ platform.

The new features will enable customers to obtain potential matches of registered Thoroughbreds based upon identification characteristics they supply. Official markings of possible matching Thoroughbreds are returned for comparison to the horse in question.

“We were overwhelmed by the pent-up demand for this service when first introduced, but in the course of working through the initial backlog with our customers we were able to jointly identify enhancements that could improve the service,” explained Alan Marzelli, president of The Jockey Club. “Providing access to our markings database was a natural first step to take, and one that should significantly improve the chances of successfully identifying tattooed but unknown Thoroughbreds.”

The benefits to TB owners and especially to rescues has been significant. Many organizations buy horses from auctions and couldn’t afford to pay to research their origins. The benefits of identifying horses are many: rescues can track down breeders and previous owners, learn how many times a horse has raced and learn its breeding.