Hurricanes / Tropical Storms » Tropical Cyclone Preparedness
Hurricane Plan To Protect Your Horses
Farmers, ranchers and horse owners have to take precautions to safeguard large animals and property during storms. Joe Kight, recently appointed the state's coordinator for disaster preparedness for the agriculture sector, answers key questions facing owners of large animals.
How, where and under what circumstances should you evacuate horses?
If you are in a storm surge area, you should evacuate yourself, your family and your horses. You should know where you're going ahead of time. Just don't leave blindly. Leave 36 hours before the storm is projected to hit. Whenever you're leaving with large animals, you should be ahead of the crowd because you don't want to get stuck in traffic. You're going to need stops for fuel and more stops for the horses. The Sunshine State Horse Council has a list of places to go to. A lot of times, we have to send people as far north as Atlanta to find an empty stall space.
How can people with horses that are not used to trailers get them to board trailers in emergency evacuations?
You need to train your horses to board trailers ahead of time. A time of emergency is not the time to be training animals. Practice your emergency plan ahead of time, and that includes loading your animal, making sure they know how to do that. If you find out your animal can't or won't load, you should have worked out a backup plan with the animal beforehand. In the 1998 wildfires, we literally had horses we had to lead for several miles [by having people walk the animals out of the fire zone with halters and lead ropes]. The horses wouldn't load into trailers, the animals weren't prepared. These were situations where people had bought 5 or 10 acres in the woods for their horses and weren't prepared for evacuating from wildfires.
If you can't leave the area, the conventional wisdom is that the safest thing to do with horses is to turn them out into a pasture during the storm rather than leaving them in a barn. Does a pasture need to be cleared of trees or other objects to be safe?
As long as you have secure fencing and adequate water, a horse is going to survive pretty well. You always have the chance for a tree to fall over and for flying debris to result. But in most cases, if you're not leaving, they're safe in a pasture. They're much more likely to suffer a serious injury in a barn — crushed bones — than in a field, where many of the injuries will be slashes or gashes.
What should people do to identify the horses, in case they get out of the pasture if fences fail, or if you are in an emergency and can't get to the horses?
All animals need to be identifiable. You never know when an animal is going to get separated from you and why. And, unfortunately, there are many unscrupulous people out there. If your horse gets out and gets into their pasture, they can claim the animal is theirs. To identify your animal, you can take a permanent marker and write on their hooves. The best thing to do is to go with a microchip. Take a picture of you with the horse, and attach it to the proof of vaccination papers.
What about drinking water for animals in pastures that may be flooded? I understand that you have to consider all rainwater polluted, so you don't want animals drinking floodwater if you can avoid it.
Make sure you have every container you have prefilled with drinking water for you, your family and your animals. A large horse or a cow drinks a lot of water in a day. But in a pasture, a [covered] canoe turned right-side-up can be a water holder. A garbage can that's cleaned out can hold water, and so can a kids' swimming pool.
Most livestock can't be evacuated. What are the challenges in keeping those operations going?
You're depending upon electricity to get feed distributed into poultry houses and to get dairy cows milked. If a cow isn't being milked, she faces potential health issues. Commercial operations have backup generators for these reasons. I don't know of any that don't. The problem is, you get complacent; you haven't tested the generator. You have to run it every now and then and make sure there's fuel for it. We get busy in our lives, and we forget these things.
The general public needs to realize a lot of private jobs are tied to agriculture. People need to realize the electricity has to be restored to those farms and greenhouses quickly, not just so the animals can be kept alive but so that people can get back to their jobs. It's extremely expensive to fuel generators. There's a reason that's not the normal power supply.
What are the problems people encounter when flying tree limbs knock down fences in pastures where beef cattle and horses are kept?
You get downed fences, and you get the animals roaming. Having horses and cows on highways as people are evacuating is not a good thing. The important thing for us is to get that fence repaired and get the animals out of harm's way. We have people who know how to do that all over Florida … the Sunshine State Horse Council, the Florida Cattlemen's Association members — we can call and get people to jump in and help. We're going to put the animal back in the closest and most secure place we can find. We collect information on where we picked up the animals, but our goal is not to establish ownership. Animals could end up in someone else's pasture. There again, some kind of personal identification system is helpful.
ONLINE HELP
Go to www.sshc.org/evac/ to find names and places of horse farms across the state that will board nonlocal horses in emergencies, as well as other evacuation information from the Sunshine State Horse Council.
The Florida Department of Agriculture has compiled easy-to-read and detailed instruction sheets on how to prepare horses, livestock and pets for disasters. To download theses guides, go to .
Last update: 2007-06-19 19:49
Author: JO-ANN JOHNSTON of The Tampa Tribune / Published: May 26, 2007
Revision: 1.0
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