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Large Animal Emergency Rescue
PHOTO COURTESY OF TLAER
By knowing what to do in the first few minutes of an emergency, you can potentially save your horse’s life. You can also use your skills to help fellow horsepeople in crisis situations. Shown is a horse highly trained to be a rescue training animal.
Learn how taking Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue courses can save a traveling horse’s life. By Rebecca Gimenez, PhD
Perhaps you’ve seen amazing photos or videos of horses being extricated from a trailer wreck, led from burning barns, or even lifted in a sling out of a ravine. Horses can become trapped in overturned or wrecked trailers, culverts, wells, ditches, mud pits, fallen trees, barns, and farm equipment. From these incidents, large animal rescue training has evolved for emergency responders, veterinarians, and interested horsepeople. The old way of just slapping a rope around a horse’s neck and pulling him to safety has largely been replaced with more profes-
USRider® Equestrian Traveler’s Companion
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sional and safer methods of providing technical heavy rescue for these fractious animal victims. Extrication of a victim that can weigh 2,000 pounds, doesn’t understand spoken language, wields dangerous weapons, and tends to panic can be difficult and dangerous for everyone, especially the horse. Did you ever wonder where the trained rescue personnel learned to respond correctly to those scary scenarios? As an active instructor in Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue, Inc., I’ve spent more than 20 years developing techniques, >> Fall 2020
