Council Directive 64/432/EEC3 applies to trade in bovine animals and swine within the Union. It provides that the competent authority in a Member State may introduce a system of surveillance networks. Those networks include a computer database which is to contain, as a minimum, a number of elements laid down in Directive 64/432/EEC, including the identification code of each animal.

Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000 of the European Parliament and of the Council4 establishes a system for the identification and registration of bovine animals. It requires as a general rule that the two official means of identification allocated to an animal bear the same identification code. However, during the initial phase of adjustment to the use of electronic identifiers as an official means of identification, it could not be excluded that, in certain cases, technical limitations related to the configuration of an animal’s original identification code could prevent the reproduction of that code on an electronic identifier. This could occur where the characters forming an animal’s existing identification code prevent that code from being converted into an electronic format. Therefore, Regulation (EC) No 1760/2000 provides for specific transitory derogations to allow the application of an electronic identifier also to those animals, provided that full traceability is ensured and that the animals can be identified individually, including the holding on which they were born. The possibility of using such electronic identifiers should be reflected in the list of elements of the computer databases laid down in Directive 64/432/EEC.