Barcoding Poultry

A team of Irish scientists has devised a method of identifying individual chickens by putting miniature barcodes on their beaks and legs, and older hens by their combs. Working at the UCD Bioresources Research Centre, the researchers achieved a 97 percent accuracy rate in experiments on identifying individual bird parts with barcodes.

Led by Professor Shane Ward, the group set out to find novel, accurate, tamper-proof and cost-effective systems to track and trace animals using among other things, biometric identification. While laying hens do not have fingerprints, they discovered they have individual comb profiles. The researchers developed specific biometric algorithms to isolate the comb profiles using mathematical modeling techniques.