Mounted search and rescue

[scotland@mindspring.com]

Una,

Contact John Douglass of the Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control 
Equine Emergency Response Team ERT).  This is an organization that evacuates 
primarily horses out of disaster areas, although we have been know to take 
camels, zebras, or anything else we can get in our horse trailers.  This is 
not a flyby night group, the ERT is an organized well trained group of 
Volunteers that go through some pretty intense training to meet certain 
levels. We had several deployments out here in California during the recent 
fires where we evacuated well over 300 horses in 4 days.

You can contact John Douglass at jdouglass@traceww.com, John is the Assistant 
Dirctor of the program and can give you some pretty good ideas on what 
training needs to be done in priority.  Trust me, you won't be sorry you 
contact him.  He is also involved in an MSAR unit they are trying to develop. 
 Who knows, maybe one back can scratch the other.

J. Lamb

-----Original Message-----
From: Una Smith <una.smith@att.net>
Sent: Sep 5, 2004 7:08 AM
To: msar-riders@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [MSAR] Equine evacuation preparedness

Horse owners in Florida with any sense will be prepared to shelter
in place;  the state is essentially impossible to evacuate.  Too
many people and too few routes off the peninsula.  For wildfires
here in New Mexico I also encourage horse owning friends to prepare
to shelter in place, but many horse owners expect also to evacuate.
So my MSAR team will be giving a series of clinics for a community
at particularly high risk.

Does anyone here have relevant evaluation forms already prepared?
We could use forms for trailer rig safety checks, trailer driving
skills, horse handler's trailer loading and unloading skills, and
(last but not least) horses' ground manners and trailering skills.

We could also use some forms for developing individual evacuation
plans.  Eg., a form where the horse owner writes down where they
will take their horse, contact names and numbers, how they will
mark their horse in case someone else takes it, relevant issues
to keep in mind (horse freaks about X, horse needs medications or
a special diet), etc.

        Una Smith
        Santa Fe County Sheriff's Posse 
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