The man known around the racetrack as the Lip Flipper wasn’t having any of it.

“I don’t flip lips any more,” Jim Zito, the chief horse identifier for the New York Racing Association, says while turning away the pleadings of a photographer to flip a horse’s upper lip to check its identifying tattoo.

“We’ve gone high-tech; we use the horse’s markings, digital photography, and laser printers to identify a horse,” Mr. Zito says. “It’s much more reliable, less invasive, and a lot cleaner and safer.”

Sad, but true: Lip flipping has gone the way of the old ban on using telephones at the racetrack – at least in New York and California.

“Most of the tattoos are unreadable, anyway,” Mr. Zito, a short, stocky 52-year-old from Westchester who’s been a NYRA horse identifier for 20 years, says. “It’s an old-fashioned system that really doesn’t work very well.”

Lip flipping – a profession dating back to the days before throwaway stretchy gloves – was one of the worst jobs at the track, second only to the guys who have to collect urine samples from horses after the race.

The flippers had to greet each horse as it reached the saddling paddock, flip its upper lip with one hand, and check the tattoo – trying to avoid the drool, dribble, or the occasional bite.

“Sometimes the horses would fight you, and sometimes you’d get your fingers nipped,” he laughs. “Thoroughbreds are very high-strung animals, and the less you have to handle them in the paddock, the better.”

Though horse identifiers may be the Rodney Dangerfields of the racetrack, they are the first – and often the last – line of defense against the unscrupulous owner or trainer who would try to “run a ringer,” substituting a good horse for a similar-looking bad one.

The most famous ringer case came at Belmont Park in 1977, when a veterinarian named Mark Gerard ran a champion horse from Uruguay called Cinzano under the name of Lebon, a clunker.

Gerard bought both horses in Uruguay and brought them to America. When Lebon died a short time later, prosecutors said Gerard claimed the dead horse was the heavily insured Cinzano. He collected on the insurance policy and then ran Cinzano as Lebon.

The horses looked similar – each had a white marking on the forehead – and their papers were apparently switched in Uruguay, fooling the vets and identifiers.

Gerard bet heavily on the horse when it ran at Belmont in late September 1977, and he reportedly cashed some $78,000 in bets. Racing officials were suspicious because of the large wagers, and he was eventually caught, suspended, and convicted, drawing a year in jail.

“Things really tightened up after that,” Mr. Zito says. “That was a real wake-up call.”

Now, Mr. Zito says, identifiers rely on foal papers, photographs, and “night-eyes,” or “chestnuts,” leathery patches on the inside of the horse’s legs, just above the knees. They are the horse’s fingerprints; as with humans, no two are the same.

“We also use blood-typing and a detailed listing of the horse’s cowlicks and other markings on the head, body, and legs,” Mr. Zito says. “Even though all racing states but us and California still use tattoos, they are only as good as the person who put them on, and most of them fade after a while.”

“Occasionally we get a horse in that doesn’t match the markings and we will not allow it to run until we’re sure it’s the right horse,” he adds. He says such mix-ups usually result from a simple mistake of the wrong horse being brought to the track from another state.

The identification process starts two days before a race, when the horses appear in the advance entries, called overnights. The identifiers pull each horse’s records and photos, and vets are assigned to check them out for soundness and identity. Some vets still flip lips, Mr. Zito says, as part of the process.

About once a month, he says, a wrong horse slips through the process, all the way to the last step, and must be scratched because of identity questions.

“If we make a mistake and there’s ever another Lebon/Cinzano case, there will be hell to pay,” he says, contending that the sport is hurt by a lack of federal rules and insufficient money for identification programs.

“Racing doesn’t need another black eye. Racing seems to shoot itself in the foot every once in a while. There’s no uniformity; not in indentification, drug testing, or anything else. We truly are the first line of defense and a lot of the people who run racing just don’t take it seriously enough.”