WF in Slovenia
The first Icelandic horses were brought to Slovenia in 1993. Since then, the population has slowly been increasing and there are now about 450 registered Icelandic horses in Slovenia.
In year 2007, Slovenia (DRIKS – Drustvo Rejcev Islandskih Konj Slovenije) joined the WorldFengur project. Before this, registration was done by the National Horse Breeding Service at the Veterinary Faculty Ljubljana on basis of identification and registration checks, but without parental verification or entry of the horses into any database.
From 2007 on, registration and issuance of documents for all foals as well as entry into WorldFengur was done automatically and it was mandatory.
All other Icelandic horses, born before 2007, were only entered into WorldFengur if needed – for example breeding mares or sport horses that wanted to participate in a competition.
It was really a lot of work, as many horses did not have complete data, UELN numbers in most cases did not exist at that time.
IS1999184970 – Vonarneisti frá Lynghaga and Timotej, just before the WorldChampion 2007 (photo: Sibil Slejko)
IS2002235027 – Gyðja frá Skipaskaga with the total score of 8.18 the highest judge breeding mare in Slovenia
Although the cooperation between the different FEIF member countries was beneficial, it was still difficult to collect the necessary information from other countries – but this was important to us as most of the breeding horses were of foreign origin.
Slovenia was not actively involved in the further development of WorldFengur, except for entering data on Slovenian Icelandic horses into the database. The fact that WorldFengur offers a great variety of information in one place about the Icelandic horses breed all over the world made it an important tool for the Slovenian Horse Breeding Service which in the daily work used it i.a. to look up information on UELN and FEIF numbers, pedigrees, DNA profiles and DNA results from parentage verification.
When comparing the database as it is today with the early years, it is now a transparent and easy-to-use tool where upgrades are rational and adapted to the situation – to sum up, WorldFengur is extremely important and a very helpful and useful tool for the registration of Icelandic horses in Slovenia!
Text: Nataša Gorišek