I thought it a bit strange yesterday when I saw a pink-handled pitchfork and broom hanging from a stall door of the isolation facility at Woodford Equine Hospital. After all, this wasn’t a color-coded team setup at a Pony Club rally (although such a scenario of matching muck buckets, pitchforks, and brooms hung in meticulous order would be familiar to me, from my Pony Club days!). But when I noticed the yellow-handled, red, blue, etc. implements on the stall doors alongside the pink ones, the reason became clear. Biosecurity.

In a day and age when hand sanitizer flows like water and eyes roll when people don’t cough into their elbow, biosecurity is not an unfamiliar term to us. We shudder at the thought of contracting a methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (say it five times, really fast) infection. We wince when we hear about the strangles outbreak at the barn down the lane. “Glad it’s not my barn.” But we’ve all encountered some kind of scenario when biosecurity has become an issue.

I ought to give you the context of the pink stall utensils: I was out at the clinic for my lunch hour, finishing up some reporting that I’m doing for one of our sister publications, Keeneland, about neonatal intensive care. It never hurts to be out with the horses and their amazing veterinarians, even if the smell of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) permeates the air.

Given the challenge of explaining foal neonatal intensive care unit concepts to a reader who is not as familiar with horses as readers of The Horse are, I had to take a big step back and think about what a person unfamiliar with horse care would wonder about getting these little bodies well