Preplanning Encouraged for Dealing with Livestock Transportation Emergencies

Saskatchewan Agriculture is encouraging the livestock sector 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.

Clip-Trent Catley-Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture:

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.

Then the big one is your resources. 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. 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.