Mounted search and rescue

["T Finkle " <tfinkle@erols.com>]

Well said Irv!

 

To add: Horses also learn and do know the difference working and pleasure riding.  Our MSAR team (as like most other MSAR teams) practice/drill with our turnout gear.  When on mission the same gear is used, which helps the horse understand that he/she has a job and will learn what those jobs skills are.  Training with other MSAR equines (and MSAR Teams) also reinforces their learned jobs skills.  It is impossible for a mount to perform as a public safety working animal unless it is exposed to regular and routine training or deployment (mock or real).  If an equine does not train with other MSAR mounts on a routine basis, then it is simply a trail horse.   

 

A properly trained MSAR mount knows the difference between flashing lights of an emergency vehicle and a subject with flashlight in a search area. They can ignore generator at base camp, yet will alert on a running car engine located well past a trail head.   An MSAR will ignore a few dozen people at base camp, but provide a strong alert on a person walking in the woods 100 meters away.  Yes Irv, I agree MSAR horses are smart and learn their job if provided real life (SAR) training on a regular basis.  Just like any other equine discipline; MSAR mounts must train with other MSAR mounts in order to be effective and to know/learn their job, they simply can not learn the job in any other way.

 

Nowadays many AHJ/RA’s are requiring SAR teams to have documentation that each member attends one search or FSE mock search, plus complete 2 or 3 search tasks yearly.  This holds true for MSAR teams too.  If a full scale multi discipline exercise is conducted properly, than an MSAR equine will know that duty calls and will remember its training, just as it would deployed on a live mission.  This is why more and more AHJ/RA’s mandate that team training must be routinely conducted and training records on each rider and mount must be maintained (documentation of testing and training to standards has become the NRF ESF-9 norm).           

 

T’mi

www.trotsar.org

 

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From: msar-riders-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:msar-riders-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Irvin Lichtenstein

Most people, and most “horse requirements” are desirous of a horse that doesn’t react to anything on the trail. If you look at what is advertised as bomb proofing  clinics,. they involve, literally, bombs (fireworks, smoke, flapping objects, crazy people, dogs) with the object of teaching the horse to ignore these.  This is fine for a trail horse that never leaves the park, or maybe a police crowd control mount.

 

But as I have been writing about and advocating since the late 1980’s you must use your horse’s senses and brains to partner with you on a search.  There are some things your horse should react to and some things he should alert you to.  Mine knows about shotguns and stops dead in his tracks if he hears one. He also tenses up because he knows shotguns are bad.  He doesn’t like the noise small motorcycle engines make because the people who ride them often don’t know what they are doing and shouldn’t be in the park anyway.  But once he identified the engine as not moving towards him he tolerated it.  He will move around farm machinery, but not heavy construction equipment because he knows dozer operators can’t see or hear him.   

 

And he tells me what is ahead often minutes before we get there or it gets to us.  Horses are really smart. They can learn to trust their rider and when not to. They will learn what is dangerous to them and what is not, partly by how you react and partly by how others on the trail react. If you keep your horse in an environment where he is never exposed to the real world of farm machinery, vehicles, other horses you need to train him how to be a social animal.  If the opposite is true they will just learn on their own for the most part.   

 

Irv Lichtenstein

SE PA SAR