Save Your Horse!

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Knowing some basic facts about how fire affects stables and horses may help you improve your ability to save your horses.

• According to Fire Safety Standards, regular smoke alarms are useless because false alarms are set off by dust and moisture in the stable. There are systems available for stables but the only truly safe system uses sprinklers.
• Don’t waste your money on high tech smoke detection systems that buzz into the local fire department. Even if the station is fully staffed you might get a response in five minutes. Otherwise, like many of us, the call goes into a volunteer station where the responders are paged, they drive into the station to pick up the rigs, and then they drive to the fire. In less than fifteen minutes your horses are dead from smoke inhalation and the stable is burned half way to the ground.
• The typical fire doubles in size every three minutes and it only takes three minutes to reach a temperature over one thousand degrees.
• Depending on the stall construction, horses in stalls adjacent to the fire have up to five minutes to be rescued.
• A fire extinguisher lasts about 9 seconds.
• A stable fire is not just grass and wood. It consists of tack cleaner and plastic coffee pots and manure carts with tires and baling twine and bridles and saddles and light fixtures. The smoke will be filled with “methyl-ethyl bad stuff”.

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Although it goes against all logic, a horse will return to his stall in a burning barn. There is reason for this. If he is regularly stabled, he perceives his stall as a safe place. This is where food is available to him. When he is scared witless, this is where he will return to find that feeling of security.

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It used to be that the California was known as the state that held its collective breath every summer, waiting for the onslaught of wild land fires. With the effects of climate change being felt throughout the country, wild land fires are becoming commonplace in areas as diverse as Florida, Montana, Oklahoma and Canada. Even the soggy northwest is not immune. What was a regional issue is now a national concern.

While California horse owners have learned how to live with the threat, the rest of the country is just waking up to the very real possibility that they, too, could be affected.

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If you own a horse, or even spend time around one, eventually you’ll need to tie him to something.

We all take tying for granted. We’ve done it a thousand times. We brush our horses, saddle them, clean their feet, and enter them in shows where they spend hours attached to the side of our trailers. We attach them to cross ties in barns and wash racks. We tie them to posts, and hitching rails, trees, and almost anything we think is stationery and strong. Throw the lead rope around SOMETHING, and your horse will stay. Or will he?

Time and again you see horses tied in an unsafe way, and the horse gets into trouble; sometimes injuring himself to the point of death; sometimes injuring others around him.

Here are some simple rules to review that will keep your horse out of trouble. Keep reading →