Jockey Club offering free IDs of tattoos

[Merlinsky]

Originally Posted by paisjpq

the tricky part is when the letter can't be read...I remember trying to find out info on a horse that had pretty clear numbers but an illegible letter and the people at JC wouldn't help because they re-use the numbers every year. And the owner was even willing to pay...they never offered to research against markings etc...

Couldn't you get a list of the horses with that number and figure out which ones match the approximate age/color/gender? If there were still a problem and you really needed to know, maybe one of the people who were potential prior owners could be shown a picture to ID. There's always a DNA match with the possible parents that you've narrowed it to. Horses are only so old, you could probably get pretty close to guessing within 5 choices right?