Featured Article (January 2008)

The Virginia State Animal Response Team—Part 2

Any Animal, Any Disaster, Anywhere — What horse owners should know

In the December issue, the Virginia Horse Journal presented an overview of the Virginia State Animal Response Team’s (VASART) establishment in the Commonwealth in an interview with of Peggy Allen, chair of the VASART board of directors. State animal response teams, or SARTs, have been formed in 19 states and are dedicated to preparing and planning for, responding to and recovering from animal emergencies.

In this issue we speak with Dr. Shea Porr, equine extension agent for the Northern District since 2006, who is playing a vital role in VASART in the area of training. Dr. Porr has been involved in many aspects of the horse industry—within the university system as a teacher, researcher, and extension associate, and within the industry as a nutritional consultant and district manager for a major feed company. She has returned to the field of extension to coordinate the growth and development of an adult extension program for the horse industry in Northern Virginia.

Dr. Porr attended VASART’s summit in August 2007, but she has been interested in equine emergency preparedness and response for a number of years based on observations and stories about emergency situations in which responders found themselves face to face with very large and terrified animals they knew nothing about.

"Accidents and injuries happened both to the horses and to the rescuers trying to handle them because they just didn’t understand what they were doing," said Dr. Porr. "I wondered what would happen if a tornado or hurricane came through, horses were out loose, and the sheriff’s department was the first one to show up and they had no clue how to handle a horse. It gets even worse if there’s a mass evacuation and you’re trying to coordinate all these things at different levels. Then Katrina came through and really made me think about it."

She continued, "The extension role will be in education and training, and during an emergency, logistical. The training we are developing for firefighters, policemen, and animal control officers who don’t have experience with horses will be on basic horse behavior and what to do until the vet arrives. They’ll receive hands-on handling instruction on approaching horses, catching and leading them, turning, backing, stopping—all the things they might have to do if they encounter a horse when they get a call. Horse owners will learn about emergency preparedness and response, whether they’re weathering an emergency on the farm or in the event of evacuation."

A: All the 23 participants were firefighters, police officers, and animal control personnel from Fairfax County. We did a pre-program survey, and most said they had either no experience or beginner experience with horses. About 25% said they’d be ‘highly comfortable’ handling horses, but the bulk of them said ‘somewhat comfortable.’ By the time the program was over, that had switched to the bulk of them being ‘highly comfortable’ and just a few saying that they were only ‘somewhat comfortable’ with horses.

We’re doing another session in Spotsylvania in January and we’ll evaluate that one as well as the one we just did at the MARE center to work out any issues that we might have. Then I’m going to package the program and make it available to all the county agents around the state. We’ll offer it at least once a quarter in Northern Virginia and possibly even more often than that.

We covered reading horses’ behavior—watching the ears, the eyes, the mouth, the tail—and how to safely approach horses in stalls, in paddocks and pastures, how to handle groups of horses, or horses with groups of people. We taught them how to be a human fence to help trap a horse somewhere so that one person can then get in to catch them. We talked about what to do in a flipped trailer emergency—how to stop traffic, how to calm horses that were panicked, and ran through a couple of scenarios like loose horses on a highway. It was a hands-on, think-about-it class to encourage them to figure out how to apply the fight or flight behavioral characteristics we had taught them.

Dr. Jennifer Brown did a wonderful job of putting together the "what to do until the vet arrives" segment. In the follow-up survey, 100% of the participants said they got a lot out of it, would recommend it to colleagues, and would like more advanced training. We are looking at trying to build an intermediate course that will present basic first aid and maybe how to load and unload a horse on a trailer. From there they’d go on to large animal technical response where we’d bring in the training group from South Carolina. They have trained horses and equipment to simulate extricating a horse from a mud hole, out of a steep ravine, or out of a flipped-over trailer. We’re looking at bringing that training here in 2009.

A: We intend to grow it every year. Next year I will probably reach 200. I don’t know how many other agents will put the program on locally, but I’ve already had the extension agent in Chesapeake ask me to send him the program and I may visit them to train them to run the program in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake. There’s interest in other parts of the state as well, and we’re getting it moving.

I had already anticipated needing to run this program on a regular basis for the next several years and rotating it through the various counties I’m responsible for, and then making that package available to other counties in the state so they can run it in their locale as well.

A: It’s enables emergency response for animals to be coordinated with the human emergency response side of things. Animal response teams will be made up of people trained to handle emergencies involving horses as well as where to locate resources. For example, if a trailer flips over, how do you cut it open and get the horses out safely? You can’t just tie the horse to a tow truck and drag it out.

VASART will also teach people how to work within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) incident command structure (ICS) that’s used in emergencies and disasters. ICS means that the same concepts and regulations for people are applied to the animal side of an emergency; that makes response efforts operate much more smoothly because they’re all "speaking the same language."

The SART concept works for very small things, such as a horse stuck in a pond or ravine, or a large thing like a hurricane where evacuation is required. So, not only are we teaching

people how to rescue the animals and handle them safely and how to work within the ICS, but we will also work with all of the emergency response for the human side so that, when possible, the horses or companion animals can be housed near where the people are. That allows people access to their pets and animals, and if set up correctly and securely, enables owners to take care of their own animals offsite, which decreases the demand on the SART volunteers who are managing the incident.

A: I’m putting into play the emergency responder training as I draft the training protocol for volunteers who want to be involved with County Animal Response Team (CARTs). I’m putting together the program for horse owners as the next step after the responder training.

Next year I intend to not only do the emergency responder training but also to start some horse owner training. I’m just one person so I can’t do all of these. That’s where the volunteers and extension agents are going to come in. Extension will be in a teaching mode: we will teach volunteers, responders, and horse and animal owners how to be prepared in case of an emergency. Then if an incident happens, the extension role will be primarily logistical.

A: All of our extension agents at the county level know where everything is in their county—who has space, feed, trailers, they know who has what. If something happens, SART can call extension and say, ‘We need to relocate all these people and animals out of this area.’ That’s where we can say, ‘We have preset the state fairgrounds and this location, etc., and they can handle x number of animals.’ Then they begin coordinating the movement of animals out of one area and into the others.

Those agreements have to be worked out ahead of time. How many animals can they take? How long will they keep them? Are they going to charge for their time there? Those are things you need to know up front and there’s a lot of legwork that needs to be done. Extension’s role during an event is going to be logistical, coordinating who, what, where, and when. It won’t happen tomorrow. It will happen in stages. North Carolina has been working on their system since 1999 and they’re still refining it.

I fully expect us to do the same thing but we’ll probably progress a little faster because we have their help. And we also have feedback from Katrina and the people down in Louisiana who had things in place but were completely overwhelmed by the scope of what happened. We can take from other experiences to modify our own progression and hopefully come up with a really good plan. Hopefully nothing will ever happen and we will have worked hard to put together a beautiful program that we never have to use. But it pays to be prepared.

A: We don’t have any CARTs set up yet. That’s because the whole VASART program is too new, and also because the VASART board is going to have to decide what is required for a CART to be officially recognized. They are talking to other locations that have CARTs in place, but they’re also talking to counties in Virginia that already have animal rescue programs. One of those is Fluvanna County. A representative from Fluvanna spoke to us at the summit and explained all that they had to go through to get their animal emergency response program set up and recognized.

The VASART board will be getting together in the near future to set up requirements for CARTs, and they will also state the requirements for becoming a certified SART volunteer. We’ll then have to develop the curriculum that will be appropriate so that people will understand where they fit into to the big picture as a CART volunteer.

For more information, go to the VASART website at www.virginiasart.org. That’s a very good place to start, or contact me or your local extension agent. (Dr. Porr’s email address is cporr@vt.edu.) u

Max Francis says, "You are never too young to learn about horses! Read the Virginia Horse Journal."