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What is ear tags and Why you need it ?

Apr 12, 2024

If you’ve ever been on a cattle farm, driven past one, or seen one on TV, you might have noticed something unusual about the animals’ ears. Regardless of whether they’re cows or bulls, you may or may not have noticed that most of them have a certain kind of ‘accessory’ attached to their ears. Often, these things also have some sort of writings on them as well.

What are they? They’re cattle ear tags.

These tags come in several different types and materials, but they all serve the same general purpose: they help the dairy farmer manage their livestock much more efficiently.

In this article, we’re going to explore everything you need to know about cattle ear tags. We’ll begin by understanding cattle ear tags' functionality before looking at the many different types that farmers use today. To expand your understanding, we’ll discuss how those tags are put on and taken off and what other animals use them as well.

How Do Cattle Ear Tags Work?

As mentioned earlier, cow ear tags come in all sorts of different types. Still, they generally serve the same purpose and therefore work the same way.

Farmers may choose to tag one or both ears of their cows and bulls. Then, they’ll take crucial information and print it onto those tags. There’s no fixed way to do it, so farmers can either do it with a good old marker pen or printed it using a laser printer specially designed for ear tags.

As you’ll see a little later in this article, electronic cattle ear tags or ‘smart tags’ are also becoming increasingly popular these days. With that kind of cow ear tag, you can encode the information digitally onto the tags directly. Retrieving all sorts of information on individual animals becomes much easier since all you’d need to do is scan their ear tags.

What Do Tags On Cows' Ears Mean?

Typically, farmers use cattle ear tags as a form of identification. That’s right! Even cattle have their ID numbers, and they’ll carry it on those ear tags wherever they go. Doing this will allow farmers and other workers to quickly identify each cow or bull, just by referring to their ID number.

By making it easy to identify each animal, farmers and any relevant authorities can trace the animal’s life from birth to slaughter.

On top of that, the cow ear tags are also useful to mark the animals’ birth dates. That way, it becomes much easier to determine the animal’s maturity just by looking at the tag from afar.

What are the Benefits of Cattle Ear Tags?

There is a long list of benefits for farmers who use cattle ear tags. For starters, those tags allow them to visually identify each cow or bull, making it much easier to manage them. For instance, providing vaccinations or medications becomes much easier thanks to tagging since there is a lower chance of mistakenly providing it to the wrong animal.

Plus, the widespread use of cow ear tags means that farmers do not have to resort to older, more painful methods of labeling their animals. One practice that cattle ear tags replaced is cattle branding, where farmers use a hot branding stick to burn markings into the animal’s skin. Thanks to ear tags, those painful and inhumane methods have become obsolete.