When a horse finds itself in a tough spot – stuck in a sinkhole, trapped in an overturned trailer, or running down the highway – it very often makes the news, especially if the horse is successfully rescued. But when a horse owner or passerby calls emergency services for help, the chances are good that in many places, those first responders have never touched a horse before, and may have no idea how to safely approach whatever pickle the horse has gotten themselves into.
One Central Kentucky event seeks to make those calls less panic-inducing, for horses and humans alike.
Every year the Kentucky Horse Council (KHC) holds a large animal rescue training course that spans over three days at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Ky. The course is designed to educate emergency responders, veterinary professionals, animal control officers, horse industry professionals and other interested parties on the rescue and emergency protocol for horses.
“Dr. Rocky Mason [KHC board member] basically is the proponent behind it,” said Sarah Coleman, executive director of the KHC. “He does a majority of the fundraising for it. He located the teachers who bring their helpers and their trailer and all their equipment. He had already known of them so he knew with all of the horses and other large animals that we have here in Kentucky, there was this really strong need for that education and training.”
The large animal rescue training course is taught by Tori and Justin Mcleod, owners of 4Hooves Large Animal Services (4HLAS) in Biscoe, N.C. The 4HLAS team offers a wide variety of services outside of large animal rescue training courses, including large animal emergency response, equine transport, emergency and specialized equine transport, equestrian event emergency standby, end of life services, large animal rescue equipment sales, and assistance with equine cruelty investigations. Some of these services are only offered to certain locations based on distance from 4HLAS, but the Mcleods are eager to help in any way they possibly can, no matter what the location is.
“It depends on the nature of the emergency, our response time, and all of the limiting factors,” Tori Mcleoud explained. “More often than not, we have resources that we have trained over the years that we'll call who are closer to that area to see if they can respond to help. If that is not an option we can also help them on the phone through facetime or texting with pictures back and forth. We've done several rescues just helping out over the phone.”
The large animal rescue training course at the Kentucky Horse Park consists of three days of classroom instruction as well as hands on training for a wide variety of scenarios and topics. These include animal behavior, handling and restraint, containment, motor vehicle accidents and overturned trailers, entrapments, barn fires and wildfires, unstable ground incidents, natural disaster preparation and response, hazardous materials decontamination, and more. The training course is open for auditing to anyone who is interested in learning more about large animal rescue techniques, but only around 40 spots are available for hands-on training participation.
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A big part of what these attendees take away from the training course can go far beyond the in-class and hands-on instruction provided by the Mcleods as well.
“We'll find that a lot of our student base in the classes are usually from the local area so it also becomes a networking opportunity for everybody,” Mcleod said. “The fire department members that may not have known an equine vet in their response area now know one because of the class. Now there's that face-to-face relationship. Not only do they know each other now face to face, but they also have seen each other in a training environment while figuring out rescue scenarios so if there was a real emergency, there's more of a grasp on how somebody would behave during that rescue operation. It's a lot easier for them to work together as a cohesive team instead of just being complete strangers meeting for the first time at an overturned trailer with 10 horses in it.”
It is also important to note that these courses are not isolated to the state of Kentucky or North Carolina.
This training in Rocky Mount, Va., helped first responders learn how to safely use heavy equipment to lift a horse if necessary. (They are practicing on a mannequin).
“We'll go anywhere someone wants to pay us to go. We've had invitations out to Colorado to do classes there,” Mcleod said. “There are other teams, sort of our colleagues, that do training courses so we kind of refer them to areas where it wouldn't be financially reasonable for us to go. We usually go on the East Coast. We've done classes annually in Kentucky and numerous classes throughout North Carolina and Virginia. We've done a couple of classes up north, but predominantly it's North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia so far. Wherever the need is we'll go.”
With the very high quantity of horses and large animal livestock in not only Kentucky, but the entire Southeast, training like what the Mcleods offer can make a huge difference in the face of natural disasters like the tornadoes that ripped through the Southeastern portion of the United States in December. The chief of the Marshall County, Kentucky rescue team, Charles Pratt, and the rest of his team are some of the many people who have been able to put the large animal rescue training to use.
“We had a couple horses that were on the ground tangled up in some barbed wire,” Pratt explained about the aftermath of the tornado. “We had to go up there and get them calm and protect their faces the way they taught us in the animal rescue class. Because of the training, we were able to get some grants and buy the equipment that we needed. It would've been very hard for us to do what we were doing without having the proper equipment and knowing how to use it.”
Outside of natural disasters, there are endless possibilities and situations where horses and other large animals get into dangerous situations and need to be rescued. Most importantly the people that rescue them need to be able to do so in a way that doesn't compromise the animal's safety or their own. This can seldom be accomplished without knowledge and proper training, which is not offered to most general emergency responders.
“My biggest thing is for any emergency service or rescue squads to try to seek that training because when you least expect it you're going to have to do it,” Pratt concluded.
Learn more about 4Hooves Large Animal Services here.
Learn more about attending the KHC large animal emergency rescue training course here.
The post How’d He Do That? Large Animal Rescue Training Courses Are There To Help Emergency Responders Help Horses appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
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