2012 Autumn - The Fell Pony Society

Secretary’s Report
As usual, I start this report by reading what I wrote last year, and here I am
again, writing it two days before Sue’s deadline.
We’re back to ‘normal’ in the office after a hectic Anniversary Convention week
and I have made a mental note to never, ever agree to holding a barbecue for
seventy people here again. It was a very busy day, but I think people enjoyed
themselves and the sun shone. We had a surprising number of comments as to
how tidy the office was, which made all the hectic filing and cleaning in the previous
days worthwhile – we’ll make an effort to keep up to it in future. The
whole week, starting with the Breed Show, seemed to go very smoothly and many
people have said that they thought the decision to relocate the show to avoid
cancellation was a good one. I managed to fit a couple of stud visits in and
around work, and enjoyed my visits to Greenholme and Rackwood very much.
Last year we were in limbo about Defra’s intentions for Passport Issuing Organisations
and the future of the National Equine Database. We were notified recently
that Defra have decided not to award a contract for the continuation of
NED beyond the end of September, so the NED website will cease then. Defra
have informed us that they ‘intend to work with PIOs to ensure that horse passport
data continues to be collected and stored appropriately and in a manner that
will support the provision of data to authorised enforcement bodies’. They have
indicated that this will give them ‘an opportunity to review the efficiency criteria
under which all PIOs must operate. This will include amongst other elements a
review of passport quality and robustness to ensure that all UK passports offer
suitable safeguards against tampering to a common and uniform standard’. We
have had in the office an instance of a passport returned from an abattoir that
had had the microchip information erased. The passport had been reported missing
after the pony had gone through a sale and the auction mart had paid for a
duplicate passport after the pony’s chip had been checked. The passport returned
to the office by the abattoir was the original passport but it’s anybody’s
guess as to what the slaughtered pony was. Native Ponies GB had a very productive
meeting with Defra in July, mainly about issues in Europe with passports and
Daughter Societies, and it was good to meet two of the people on the Horse Passports
team and to find them helpful and informative.
I’m currently liaising with Adam Day from North West Auctions on plans for our
Fell Pony Sale – the new auction mart at Kendal isn’t completely finished yet, but
I’m assured it will be by the date of our Sale. I’m hoping to fit in two weeks holiday
at the end of September, returning in time to send out this magazine and
prepare the Sale catalogue.
Elizabeth
30 August 2012
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