August 2022 Issue

Page 18 August 2022 EAST COAST EQUESTRIAN Last Chance Ranch in Quak- ertown, PA will present a Large Animal Rescue Clinic. The two- day clinic for animal rescuers, owners, and lovers will be held August 13 and 14 from 8 am to 5 pm. Topics Include: Hazard Iden- tification, Scene Management, Large Animal Safety, A-Frame/ Sling Use, Emergency Scene Analysis, Rolls/Pulls/Assists, Control/Containment, Basic Vitals & Field Triage, Low Angle Ropes, Knots, Mechanical Ad- vantage System, Practical Field Scenarios, and more. The cost is $350. Attendees must bring work gloves, cloth- ing, and footwear suitable for the weather and tasks, and a safety helmet. Check in-in starts at 7:30 am on August 13 and the event will be held rain or shine. The Large Animal Rescue Operations (LARO) training is essential for firefighters, law enforcement, animal control, humane societies, and emergen- cy animal response teams. Inci- dents that involve large animals require special considerations Large Animal Rescue Clinic Planned and training. LARO simulates those incidents by using scenar- io training with both live horses and life-size, weighted, artic- ulated horse mannequins that allow training for virtually any LARO situation. There will be a different team rescue scenario each day. This training is de- signed to equip responders with a variety of options to handle most large animal situations; in- cluding situational awareness to recognize when knowledge and skills may be out of scope. No previous experience with large animals is required to attend this training. The training is conducted by ASAR Training and Response, a technical rescue team specializing in both FEMA Resource-Typed and NFPA-based training for practical field and disaster animal rescue applications. Instructors provide comprehensive and life-safety-enhancing planning, response, and functional training in cooperation with local, State, and Federal agencies. To register visit asartraining. com/events/ Go ahead...Ask da Mare By Malorie de la Mare Dear Mal… HELP! I have never seen so many ticks on my horse. And I won’t go into how many I find on myself, in my boots and on my clothes. This is the core of a discussion I’ve been having with several of my friends. All of us have been noticing ticks on our pets and—really creepy!—in our houses. Besides being worried about all the tick-borne diseases, I’m having major anxiety about what the heck all this is telling us about our planet. You’ve got a good answer, right? -Ticked Off Dear Ticked Off… Join the club! Ticks are an odious scourge, and they are getting worse. As a matter of fact, their geographic range is increas- ing as northern areas are staying warmer for longer. There was a time, not long ago, when we had winter—a season during which many days the temperature never rose above freezing. That was an environment hostile to ticks and many ticks didn’t survive. So when spring arrived, it brought with it fewer ticks. We’re stuck with the climate we have, and we need to adapt! We can’t wrap our horses in bubble wrap or keep them locked up in stalls that have been purged of anything that might have a tick attached (like hay!). Unfortunately, horses are much happier when they have pasture time. And pastures are a favored hunting spot for ticks, just waiting for a warm-blooded critter to wander by. It could be a deer or a raccoon or a horse or…you! So, what on earth can one do to protect the vulnerable horse, innocently munching grass in the pasture? Obviously horse owners need to send their horses out as protected as possible. Using a spray or bug repellent that includes ingredients that specifi- cally target ticks, clipping horses’ fetlocks and rigorously checking horses’ manes, tails and bellies when they come in from the pas- ture are important strategies. There are some other effective strategies you can deploy—de- pending on whether or not you keep your horse on your own property. Guinea fowl and chick- ens feast on ticks. And they get along well with horses. There are companies that promise they’ll eradicate ticks and mosquitoes from your property. How do they do that? It’s probably not some sort of electro-magnetic wave machine. Instead, it might involve mega-dos- es of insecticide spread over the land. Besides the probability that this strategy could put toxins onto the grasses in the pasture, it also likely destroys valuable pollinators like bees and butterflies. It might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. Dear Mal… I have this acquaintance—I’ll call her Lana—whom I met through a local equestrian trails group. She and her husband used to ride the trails near the farm where my horse lives. But they don’t really ride anymore. I don’t see her that often but run into her occasionally at community events. She has a tendency to treat every person’s positive news as if it were a personal insult. Recently at a fund-raising event she overheard me talking about my horse and how he has a new best friend in the pasture. She jumped into the conversation and started telling people about the farm where my horse lives, and how it used to be a gorgeous place but it is now pretty rundown. When I asked Lana why she said those things about the farm, she just scowled at me and said the people at the farm are all just stuck up and she couldn’t stand to be around them. Since I am one of “them,” I kind of laughed and said “Lana, I board my horse there, right?” Her re- sponse stunned me. “I know what I said, and if you cared about your horse the way you say you do, you would move him to a decent place.” There was dead silence and people started backing away and I could feel myself just shaking with anger. I wanted to shout that the farm is beautiful and my horse has never been happier and that she needed to think before she started spouting hurtful and slanderous things about people she clearly doesn’t like. Instead I walked away, angry and frustrated. What do you think I should have done? -Still Mad Dear Still Mad… I see many complicat- ed issues here, and you are blaming yourself for ignoring someone whose appalling behavior demonstrates a lack of self-awareness along with a heaping dose of rudeness. There are a lot of people who are just plain miserable—about their families, about their spouses, about themselves. And they turn all that misery out onto the world, as if we need more stuff to get upset about! Lana deserves your sympathy. You seem to be a happy person, and while it’s not up to you to plumb the depths of Lana’s weltschmerz, or to apologize for her bad manners, it may be appropriate for you to take her aside someday—not in a public place—and ask her specifically why she is so resentful of the farm where you board your horse. And, ask her precisely what she meant by suggesting you need to move your horse to a “decent place.” Does she have some kind of information about your horse that you don’t have? Has she observed bad treatment of the horses at the barn? Ask her to explain herself. You may not get the answers you want, and she may be evasive and even more unkind. But you owe it to yourself and the universe to not indulge this kind of nasti- ness. I think sometimes people get too enamored of their social media posts when they think they’ve put someone down. They don’t realize that on social media they’re basically talking to air. Thus, when a human being asks them to explain their unkindness, it may spark some empathy. Good luck! Have a question for Mal? Email her at PAEquest@aol. com. Beware of Ticks!