What a ring must carry

The workshop

Type your tag and your number: the ring is built as you go. Spin it to read the way round, or look at the flat unrolled band just below — it is the same drawing.

Three mandatory elements, and only three

Together they are the ring’s identifier. Everything else — text, logo, address, layout, the shape of the band — is left to whoever has it engraved.

• The breeder tag, three capital letters, the letter O excluded. It says who issued the ring, and it is what makes two independent numbering schemes compatible with each other.
• The number, leading zeros kept. It is the ring’s rank at that issuer, for that year.
• The colour of the band, which carries the year. It is not written down: it is seen. It is the only one of the three a hunter reports without knowing they are doing it.

A breeder may engrave nothing but MEY0143 on a green ring: that is compliant. Another may add their name, their village and a QR code: also compliant. What is not compliant is a ring without a tag — or one whose number repeats within the same colour.

The identifier is not engraved like the rest

The three mandatory elements say what to engrave. What remains is engraving them so they can be found. A ring engraved throughout in the same hand is legible — but nothing on it says where the identifier is, neither to the hunter copying it down nor to the software reading the photo.

• Taller. The identifier’s characters stand at least 1.4 times the height of everything else on the ring, and at least 2 mm. This is the distinction that costs nothing: same engraving, same tool, larger characters.
• Cut into the material, not laid on top of it. A recessed mark can still be read by finger and by raking light once the contrast has gone.
• Alone in its band. No logo, no address, no digit from the open text shares the stretch of the band the identifier occupies — and it never straddles the closure, which a photograph always cuts.

How that is achieved

This document prescribes a result, not a process: it is for the engraver to choose whatever, on their material, yields a tall recessed mark.

On anodised aluminium, a fibre laser. The beam removes the coloured anodic layer and uncovers the metal: a light mark on a coloured ground, a few hundredths of a millimetre deep, with no ink and no consumable. Above all, the number changes from ring to ring without changing tooling — which is what makes continuous numbering workable at volume. On plastic coloured through the mass a laser works too, but the result depends on the compound: test it on the real material before ordering a batch.

Never an identifier in ink. Pad printing, screen printing, a stuck-on label: ink does not survive a season of rubbing on a leg. An identifier in ink is an identifier with an expiry date, and nobody knows which.

Taller characters take up more of the band, and a ring’s circumference does not stretch: it is π times the inner diameter. The model above needs roughly 26 mm, so a ring of at least 9 mm. On anything smaller you drop the stamp, then the open text — never millimetres off the identifier.

The rule everything else rests on

An issuer never reuses a number within one year, that is, within one colour. The triple (tag, year, number) is unique.

Of the 3,619 rings fitted in 2026 across Isère and Haute-Loire, 49 numbers were carried by two rings each — and for 34 of them, no criterion available to the software can tell the two apart. If one of those rings is recovered, nobody can say where it came from, and two hunting associations end up with a false recovery rate. This whole specification follows from that.

What comes next

This document is a draft, open to criticism and versioned. The breeder tag registry — one tag, one issuer, never reused — will open on this site. Until then, write to us before having rings engraved: a tag claimed by two breeders would make their rings indistinguishable.