Great, my new horse has BCS. I thought I was going nuts as she is growing more by the week!
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I would love to read this if anyone can find it! The search function always fails me 
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Me too!
The search function on this forum is very not useful.
I could not even find a post I made, that I had a good idea of the content, using the search function.
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Forget the COTH search function. Just Google “Good Guinness Chronicle of the Horse” and these are the first two hits:
https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/good-guinness-returns-home-after-brepic-identity-mix/
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COTH was also instrumental in @Calvincrowe getting her horse back too!! Though that wasn’t a mix up in identity.
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Another favourite story I read here was from a trainer who retrains a lot of TBs… I’m going to get some details wrong but the gist of the story was that she got 2 TBs shipped in at the same time, and was told that the bay gelding has just come off the track, but the chestnut mare had been let down and restarted, already doing some small courses. The trainer was taking some clients to a show, had room on her trailer, so figured why not take the mare, ride her at the show grounds, and maybe enter her in the puddle-jumper division. Afterwards, she was kind of unimpressed with the mare — the mare got around everything, behaved herself, but seemed a lot greener than expected. When the trainer reported this to her track contact, she heard “omg, no, the GELDING has been restarted; that mare has never been ridden off the track!!” . That’s when the trainer realized the mare was something special and kept her for herself. 
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Just think if you have a grey horse who has whitened out enough that NONE of the markings are readily visible.
(Over the years until his passing, the markings noted on my grey gelding’s Coggins test became fewer and fewer. The last time his Coggins was done, the report came back with “Arabian; Grey; No white markings”. He had a star, strip, snip, upper lip and underlip on his face, a high white stocking (almost to the knee) in front, and a white sock behind. The good thing about Arabs is the dark skin - get the light colored ones wet where it counts and you can clearly see the outlines. Of course, the two white feet would’ve given something away, too.) 
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Thank you !!!
And here we go again in that 2009 thread – the description of the horse that we are all supposed to be looking out for: 17h black ISH gelding. Call ___. 
How many thousands of horses could be reported in just on that. 
But then more description was added: "GOOD GUINNESS is a dark brown Irish horse, unbranded, with a star that has roaney edges, he has a super hind end and can be a bit strong, very careful… "
We horse people are not good at this. 
All of these!
I’ll (generally) defend LE but when it comes to pets? Anyone who follows me on IG knows the number of pictures I take of my animals and I have pictures to show to prove ownership in the instance that someone with a chip scanner* isn’t around. Sure my grey pony is obvious to me and horse people to be a specific grey pony, but non-horse-people? Too hard. She has no markings, just a “plain grey,” and as we know their color changes every year so a picture last year won’t match this year (she was dark grey with black legs to the body and black mane and tail and dark dapples when I bought her in 2019 and starting last year she is nearly white with medium grey points and fleabites are coming in heavy already), but she has two forehead whirls and a lump of scar tissue on her back by her wither. These are things we need to know.
*chip scanners: please be aware that the chip battery can die, and recheck them at your annual appt assuming your vet carries one. My 8 yo Aussie was chipped around 5 mos and earlier this year we rescanned him and nada. So he got chipped again.
Most pet chips do NOT have batteries!
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Microchips are passive devices, and do not have a “battery”. The Battery is in the scanner.
A microchip implant is an identifying integrated circuit placed under the skin of an animal. The chip, about the size of a large grain of rice, uses passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, and is also known as a PIT (passive integrated transponder) tag.
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Well we all learned something. Regardless, we used two scanners and scanned his whole body, nada.
Random tangent: there’s a paint horse who has done very well this year at both APHA and NSBA and is a crazy example of birdcatcher spots. I can’t imagine tracking it year after year - WILD.
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Has that image been photoshopped? Something about the colours and focus look slightly odd to me. Could be my phone, of course.
Late to this, but to clarify: the riding of similarly colored horses is allegedly for SALE horses- so that perhaps each “plain bay no markings gelding” that is for sale has a great show record- because each horse was used for the part of Eventing it excelled at.
~Allegedly, people- don’t sue me~
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Are we talking about an isolated case of one rider - allegedly - doing this with sale horses, or is this a thing with multiple riders (allegedly)?
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I have had two stallions that I’ve used for breeding that stamp their babies into (almost) identical images of themselves so much so that it’s scary. Down to the exact markings for one. The only ones easy to distinguish were the mares from the geldings. Or geldings from their father, not each other though.
Lol - I showed up for a lesson on my OWN horse one day. I normally do my own grooming and prep. I pass the outdoor arena on my way to the barn and saw said trainer lunging a horse. Who I thought was my horse. 16+hand bay gelding with 2 rear socks and a blaze. Nope. Got all the way to the arena before said trainer says “you know know this is Dobbin, not Blaze. right?”. Whoops.
I come from the dressage world (used to event way back in the day). We get issues at least once a show with a rider, usually a pro, with multiple horses entered and they’ll manage to get by the ring steward with the wrong bridle number on the horse.
If a rider is so determined to cheat by riding two different horses that look enough alike at a glance, they’re willing to do quite a bit else to get that ribbon. Other than microchip scanning at the start of every phase once microchips are required, the only other thing I can think of is banding a horse ala concert wristbands that they must wear throughout the competition.
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Similarly the gelding I ride once got a lameness exam done because the barn owner pulled him from the field instead of the other bay gelding who was to get the exam. They don’t look exactly alike, ones a TB, the other a warmblood and they both have one small hind sock, but on different legs (I only just noticed because of this thread). I think my guy’s is on his left hind…) but I have pulled the wrong horse from the field and only realized it because they lead differently. And the other day driving in I totally did a celebratory cheer because I thought mine was only halfway down the field instead of all the way. Turns out I can’t tell them apart from behind or apparently sometimes at all.
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Dear God, I thought I was the only one!!!
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