Join the MuzzleCheck partnership.
MuzzleCheck has no farmers of its own. Every record on the register was put there by a livestock platform publishing its own farmers' stolen-stock reports. The register is the sum of its partners — it is only ever as strong as the platforms that feed it. Joining is free, and there are rules.
How the partnership works
A partner is any system that already holds livestock records or already handles livestock: a farm record app, an auction house, a feedlot, an abattoir, a saleyard, a breed society, a vet practice system. There are two ways to take part, and a partner may do both.
You put animals on the register
When one of your farmers reports an animal stolen, your system publishes that report to MuzzleCheck — and publishes the removal the moment the animal is recovered. Your farmers' reports then reach every buyer in the country, free.
You check animals at volume
Anyone may check by hand on this site, free and without an account. If you need to check hundreds of animals as they come through a gate or a ring, talk to us — the public service is rate-limited on purpose, and volume checking is arranged separately.
The contributing side is a small, deliberately boring piece of work: a handful of fields over HTTPS, authenticated with a token we issue you. Most platforms are publishing inside a day. Write to us and we will send you the API details and the contributor contract.
The rules
These are the conditions of contributing. They exist because a stolen-stock register is believed or it is useless, and every one of them protects that.
- Only the owner's own report. You may flag an animal only when its registered owner, on your platform, has reported it stolen. No third-party flags, no suspicions, no tip-offs. The owner's report is the consent, and it is the only thing that puts an animal on the register.
- Send the minimum. Species, breed, sex, the date reported, a case number if there is one, and the match keys. Never an owner's name, phone number, ID number or farm. The register cannot leak what it was never given, and that is the point.
- Take it off promptly. The moment the owner recovers the animal or withdraws the report, publish the removal. A register carrying stale flags does real harm to honest sellers, and it is the fastest way for the whole thing to stop being trusted.
- The record is yours, and so is its accuracy. You verified the owner; you hold the underlying record. MuzzleCheck does not adjudicate and cannot check your work. If your data is wrong, it is wrong on the register.
- Answer disputes. A farmer must be able to query or dispute a flag you published, and reach a human. When a dispute lands with us, we mark the flag as disputed and refer it to you.
- Your formats, your keys. You normalise your own ear tags and brand marks into match keys before publishing. The register holds no country's tag rules or brand system — which is exactly why it works the same in any country.
- Everything is kept. The register is append-only: nothing you publish can later be rewritten or quietly deleted, by you or by us. Every revision stays, and every check made against your animals is logged.
- Look after your token. One token per platform, kept secret, rotated on request and revoked if it leaks. Anything published with your token is published as you.
- Contributing buys no influence. Not over what the register says, not over how fast it answers, not over how your animals rank against anyone else's. See below.
What it costs, and what it buys
Nothing, in both directions. There is no fee to contribute and no fee to check. Partners who can help carry the running costs are very welcome to — servers, storage and the matching engine are real money — but that is a donation, and it is voluntary.
A donation, and a partnership, buy goodwill and server time. They buy no influence over the register.
No partner gets a different answer, a faster answer, a softer flag or a quieter one. If MuzzleCheck ever started favouring the platforms paying for it, its answers would become an opinion — and an opinion is worth nothing to a buyer standing at a gate. Our usefulness rests entirely on being impartial, so we guard it carefully, including from our own partners.
What a contributing partner gets
- Your farmers' stolen-stock reports reach every buyer who checks, not only your own users.
- Your farmers get told when someone checks their flagged animal — the first real signal in most theft cases.
- A permanent, independent record that the report was made, and when.
- Your own tag and brand formats supported without changing anything on your side.
- Nose-photograph matching, at no cost, from 1 September.
- Named on this site as a contributing platform, if you want to be.
What you do not get is control. That is the trade, and it is the same trade for everybody.
Talk to us
Tell us what your platform is and roughly how many animals it holds. We will send you the API details and the contributor contract, and answer anything you want to ask first.
hello@muzzlecheck.orgPut Partnership in the subject line. We answer in English, Afrikaans and isiZulu.
- You write. We send the contract and the API spec.
- We talk it through. Partnerships are agreed, not automatic — we want to know who is publishing and how they verify an owner.
- You get a test token. Publish a handful of records against the test register and make sure it behaves the way you expect.
- We switch you live. Your farmers' reports start reaching the country.
Free to join. Free to use. No exclusivity, and no lock-in — stop publishing whenever you like and we will remove your entries.
Straight talk: MuzzleCheck is a repository and a matching engine. We do not investigate, we do not recover animals and we act for nobody — not the owner, not the buyer, not the police. Read why we hold that line before you sign anything: the same limits that apply to us apply to what a partnership can do for you.