It is your unit’s responsibility to examine the assignments and provide feedback as to their appropriateness, doability, and safety for both searchers and mounts. If you do not routinely have members of your unit on the command staff to review plans and operations I hope your safety officer does when they are given to you to implement.
Ignorance is curable with education, failure to follow the law by discriminating against volunteers you can accommodate is also curable, with fines and debarment.
Anyone who is unwilling to learn is an impediment to furthering the cause of MSAR and SAR in general. The first drafts of the ASTM standards insisted on Western tack, as if any other style was not acceptable. The fact that many riders use other designs or even treeless saddles effectively took a while to get across, as did the concept that the tack should fit the horse. I do not reject another’s opinion out of hand, but they must support it with facts.
Since 1986 I have disqualified one applicant for style. She wanted to ride bareback and was quite good in the ring, but went off a few times in the woods. Everybody else uses a saddle of some kind, with stirrups and a place to hang gear. I have had friends with chronic diseases that rode well, even supervised trail building crews, but they had to be lifted onto their mount and usually rode gaited horses to ease back pain. One laid out over 55 miles of public trails from the back of an Icelandic, as she was partially paralyzed.
Irv Lichtenstein
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