“Keep your knee gently pressed into her neck, and if she decides to get up, go ahead and let her, don’t fight it.” An emergency instructor gave this advice to a firefighter learning to hold down a horse acting as an injured animal during a demonstration of applying webbing to help retrieve a horse’s body from inside an overturned horse trailer. The firefighter was a student in one of two classes in a Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue (TLAER, www.tlaer.com) course that was offered in mid-March at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) in Richmond, Ky.

The student and horse were “trapped” inside a plywood ring that simulated trailer walls. Normally a person would never be allowed to go inside an overturned trailer with the horse, but for the live demonstrations in these courses, the animals are not sedated and lie down repeatedly to allow the students to practice horse handling in real-life scenarios. These situations include horses stuck in overturned trailers, under collapsed barns, in mud, or upside down in ditches.

Preparation for taking care of horses in emergencies and disasters starts with training for emergency responders (firefighters, rescue squad members, veterinarians, police, humane, animal control and sheriff’s officers, and search and rescue volunteers) to be able to properly and safely manipulate and “package” an injured animal for transport from an incident scene. Back-to-back TLAER classes were held at EKU in a partnership with USRider Equestrian Motor Plan (www.usrider.org), which is a nationwide trailering assistance program created for equestrians. From basic dangers of using horses’ legs as handles to helicopter rescue techniques, the course covered a vast amount of information related to large animal rescue, disasters, and even bioterrorism.

The instructors feel it is just as important that the students learn about equine behavior and reactions as it is to understand the techniques of packaging or moving their 1,400-pound patient with webbing and equipment. Since normal humans have a see-decide-react time of 1.6 seconds to novel stimuli, and horses can pick up their hind leg, kick, then set the leg back down in less than 0.2 seconds, this theoretically means that a human can get kicked several times before being able to move. Sadly, the medical statistics for the horse industry in general bear this truth out: Horse owners and handlers are injured and killed, and equine veterinarians endure a much higher number of injuries and fractures over their working lives in comparison with other medical professions