Having an evacuation plan in case of fire could save your horse's life.| Photo: iStock

Today I got a note from a reader in the West who boards her horse and is trying to be prepared. Stephanie Nicole said, “Just last week I got called ‘paranoid’ and other mean comments for wanting to be prepared. I’m the only person in a boarding stable of 40-plus horses with any sort of emergency plan. I got laughed at for putting shipping boots on a horse then going 10 minutes down the road. I’m the resident ‘safety freak’ but we’ll see who’s laughing when my horse is alive and safe when something happens!”

The main theme of this blog is to learn from the successes and failures of others in similar situations and scenarios that boggle the mind’s ability to understand them. Wildfires can happen anywhere in the world, and they move very fast. In this post, we will only discuss wildfire evacuation planning, since shelter-in-place planning is extremely dangerous and very difficult in wildfire situations.

We know that firefighters and weathermen have been predicting wildfires in the Western United States would be worse than ever this year due to years of drought, buildup of forest fuels, and increasing numbers of people living in the wildland/urban interface. State animal response planners in the Western states have been warning peopleto come up with an evacuation plan for themselves, their properties, and animals before the disaster comes