Sometimes it takes a nightmare for us to wake up and take action.
That’s how a few of us got involved with our local CART (Community Animal Response Team).
For one of us, it was a trailer incident. The horse managed to jump over the chest bar and then got perilously stuck.
For me, it was an actual bad dream in which my horse fell through the pond ice.
In these the shaky, ‘Oh-Shit’ moments, the question quickly surfaces:
Who ya gonna call for a large animal crisis?
You might call the fire department.
The fire department, in turn, might call its local CART, a volunteer group certified by state agencies to help police and fire departments respond to animal emergencies and disasters.
CART teams are often trained to set up pet shelters and can have the crucial experience and equipment to handle an array of animals in crisis.
It would be nice to think that if you had an equine scare, a dozen of your horse buddies would be there immediately to help.
But the reality is: Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.
Ok, they might show up. But will they have the Sawzall, rescue glide, and heavy duty webbing required to extract your horse from his predicament?
Good Samaritans might be able to help. But more and more often, they will hesitate for fear of liability. Sad to say: we live in a litigious country.
Think of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina as the national ‘Oh Shit’ moments. Since those epic disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has seen a surge in local CART and CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) organizations.
These grassroots groups are the neighbors and Good Sams of yesteryear with one BIG difference: their asses are covered.
CART and CERT team members like myself have received many hours of fairly tedious training. It's essential, but not exactly adrenalin-inducing:
We’ve learned how to set up pet shelters.
We’ve learned how to do light search and rescue.
We’ve learned how to operate a fire extinguisher.
We’ve learned how to work within an Incident Command System (which means we toe the line within a rescue operation and don’t go rogue, trying to save the day singlehandedly.)
At our graduation, we got cake, soda, and a state-issued ID card identifying us as First Responders (our ticket past the velvet rope, er, yellow police tape of all emergency scenes)
If you’re lucky, your local CART members have some large animal training. On my CART team,
all of the charter members have completed at least one course of
Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue.
Maine is on a roll. In the past few years, its 16 counties have more and more CART and CERT teams. There is a big training jamboree in September.
Come join the fun and be part of the solution!
For more information, contact your county Emergency Management Agency or visit
Citizen Corps or
Maine’s Emergency Management site.