Because our aim is to start recording horses in the NEIT system that are born from August 2025 onwards, if you breed or plan to breed any of your horses you will need to make a plan to get that foal/s microchipped and registered.

If you are breeding a thoroughbred or standardbred, this will be something you already plan on doing so that it can be registered within that breed society register. This makes the registration process simple, as your bred societies will process the registration on your behalf.

If you are breeding anything other than a thoroughbred or standardbred, then your options vary, especially if you do not plan to register your horse with a breed society. In these situations you will still need to organise your foal to be microchipped but it will be your veterinarian who implanted the microchip that will start the registration process for you rather than your breed society.

You need to have any foals you breed microchipped and registered before they reach one year of age.

Your vet will only enter basic information into the register, such as horse name, its unique microchip number, age, gender, owner and location. You will then be sent an email to confirm that registration and add any further details.

A yearly reminder email will be sent to ensure that both the horses and your details are still correct. For those with horses still registered with NZ Thoroughbred Racing and Harness Racing NZ, this will be managed for you.

We welcome all proactive horse owners who are keen to include their older horses in the NEIT system. If they are already microchipped this is a simple process that you can do yourself on the NEIT website.

If your horses aren’t yet microchipped then you can organise to get this done with your vet, ideally when they are there for routine checkups like a dental. They can microchip your horse at the same time and then start the registration process for you.

If you sell a horse that is registered in NEIT (either born post-August 2025 or proactively registered if older), you need to transfer that ownership to the new owner and they need to ensure their details are correct.

If your horses are registered with NZ Thoroughbred Racing or Harness Racing NZ, then again, this will be managed by those groups on your behalf.

We understand that not all horse owners situations are the same and in some cases foals are bred on farms in a managed herd with low levels of human contact. Despite this it is still important to have them microchipped and registered, for a number of reasons.

• You may have mares or other horses coming onto your property which increases the risk to your ‘closed’ home herd, especially if you are buying standardbreds which generally come from high density populations of horses. You want to ensure your are protecting the disease status of your herd by understanding what has joined it.

• In some cases while stationbreds are typically bred for use on the farm it is not uncommon to break in young horses and move them on to focus on the next years breeding stock that are coming through. In these situations you will need to be able to transfer ownership of that horse to the buyer which requires the horse to be microchipped and registered on NEIT. This could become a hassle if its not already done ahead of time.

While it seems like just another thing you have to do as a farmer we suggest if you organise to have it done at the same time as something else on the farm that your vet does i.e. palpating the rams or pregnancy testing the cows, then it makes it far easier. What’s more the vet will take care of the inital registration process for you meaning you just have to keep an eye out for an email at the other end.