Preplanning encouraged for managing livestock transportation emergencies

By Bruce Cochrane, Farmscape

Saskatchewan Agriculture is encouraging the hog industry to reach out to local fire departments to help ensure they are prepared to deal with livestock transportation emergencies. "Livestock Transportation Emergencies" was the topic of a Sask Pork Spring Seminar yesterday.

Trent Catley, the Director of Saskatchewan Agriculture's Emergency Response and Inspection Unit, explains fire services are a municipal responsibility so available resources will vary from one municipality to another depending on their size and budgets.

“Reach out to your local fire department and start to work with them and identify what sort of equipment would they need. Some of your basic equipment, livestock panels, portable loading chutes, halters, zip ties, pliers, lariats, four-inch-wide strap. If you have to hoist or drag an animal out, a four-inch-wide strap is the minimum recommended width to maintain enough contact surface on the animal itself that you don't create a pinch point that starts binding into the animal, hog boards or back boards for moving animals, prods, that sort of thing,” explained Catley, who has over 30 years experience in enforcement and emergency response, including 18 years in the fire service where he developed and delivered a livestock handling course for the Saskatchewan Volunteer Fire Fighter Association.

“Identify what resources are available to assist the fire department with the response. Fire departments may never have to do a response or have very limited responses to livestock incidents so they are going to have to call outside subject matter experts so you want to identify what resources are ahead of time. What local producers could assist, associations, veterinarians, custom truckers, livestock inspectors, animal protection services, police, that sort of thing,” added Catley. “You want to identify all possible resources ahead of time. You don't want to be sorting that stuff out in an emergency. If you can deal with all of those issues ahead of time in a pre-plan then you don't have to worry about it.”

 Catley says, if planning is done beforehand, once the fire department responds, it will able to implement that plan and things will be a lot easier.

In the event of a roll-over emergency involving livestock, Sask Pork has four fully-equipped trailers across the province, including Humboldt, Moose Jaw, Unity and Rama. In the event of an emergency, call the contact in your area to arrange for dispatch of the unit.

To watch the webinar, please visit Sask Pork’s YouTube channel.

For more visit farmscape.ca.