# Stolen horses general query



## joosie (5 July 2017)

I don't want to give any details but a friend has suspicions that a horse she's looking after may be stolen. How could she go about finding out? Is there a national database for stolen horses or something like that?


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## Red-1 (5 July 2017)

The first thing I would do would be to have the horse scanned for a chip. If it has one then a vet could help decipher which company the chip was from, and you could then find more about the horse's history.

I would also look at the passport, and see who the owners were, and if concerned contact the last owner.

I would contact the Police as this is the correct thing to do, but sadly horses don't come with much hope of identification if they are plain black, bay, chestnut etc. Having said that, there are few stolen ones so it may be identified.


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## stormhorse (5 July 2017)

whereabouts is your friend as a local Horsewatch group would be able to help her. Also check stolenhorseregister.com for details of stolen horses.


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## popsdosh (6 July 2017)

Stolen horses are actually very rare contrary to urban myths.


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## Tina17 (10 August 2017)

Hate to burst your bubble I'm in a similar situation and being the honest person i am have had the vet check the passport I hold a look for a chip to which we have put the no too. However neither of us thought to check the drawing and the passport isn't that of the horse in my stable. 

To confound things more the vet States its nr impossible to trace the microchip as there's no sole database!! There's over 70 organisations so what's the point of microchip when you can even check it let alone update owners details? If you don't know the organisation whom did it in the 1st place

Horse & hound need to get the UK into 1  x data base and defra needs to sort a better passport policy as GOV sites don't request you to send the original passport to update!!


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