MY daughter Jo's old horse, Rupert, is losing what remained of his equine good looks.

At 31 years old, he is getting long in the tooth, lean on his back, scraggy all over and sporting the unkempt look of one who has spent a carefree summer outside in the company of several sex-starved tups.

All that is about to change. The tups will be off a-wooing with the ewes, and Rupert will be back inside for his winter sojourn in the stable. But before he loses that sun-kissed look, I may need to groom and prepare him for a compulsory sketch of his best features. Not by an artist, but by our vet.

I am sure this is a regulation too far, and I may well have got the whole thing wrong, but from what I have read, under new Government regulations, our vet must come to the farm to sketch Rupert, for a compulsory passport.

What I do not understand is why? Rupert will never travel off the farm again. Alive that is. He certainly will not be going abroad for his hols. His life is one long holiday. When he does go to that great pasture in the sky, it will not be to be slaughtered for food, and this is what the new passports are all about. Apparently, it is to ensure that no horse that is fed with a painkiller called phenylbutuzane will ever end up in an Italian sausage, ie salami. Part of food safety initiatives, the evidence trail, etc, etc.

I am desperately hoping that this is an April fool joke made up by an official with a poor head for calendar dates. We have cattle passports, I know, but they do not require a sketch of the cow. Nell, our Border collie, is immortalised this way. When we bought her, the breeder completed a formalised picture of her markings, so perhaps the horse passports will be on the same line.

The idea, if it is meant to protect Italian taste buds - they are off course the ones with a taste for donkey-flavoured salami - does not come from the European Union. Reportedly, it is from our very own DEFRA. Those guys who renamed themselves after the MAFF-inspired foot and mouth debacle in the vain hope that all the farmers would forget who they were.

Rupert may escape all these regulations anyway, because I doubt he is even known to our vet, at least officially. He has survived very well sharing the sheep's worm drench and has never had a cough or a tickle in his throat since he came to us 16 years ago.

When Jo first had him, we were exhorted to keep him on sawdust and only feed him wet hay. One hernia operation later, after rupturing myself lifting wet hay from a dustbin on a regular basis, and Jo and I developing our own coughs from shovelling sawdust into sacks to give him a sputter-free existence, we decided to try him on a bed of deep straw and feed him dry hay. He has never looked back. From being a horse that was a vet's delight at his previous stable, he has had 16 healthy years, although by writing this I have probably jinxed his future health.

However, if the impossible were to happen, and he was to end up in a salami, he might, just now, make very tasty eating. For the last month he has gorged himself on windfall apples. Can be heard to belch a cider-induced hic from time to time. Perhaps I'd better make sure there's a plentiful supply of sage and onions out in the field as well.

Updated: 12:38 Wednesday, November 19, 2003