After the fire swept through the San Luis Rey Training Center, its equine residents relocated to facilities such as they Ventura County Fairgrounds seen here. Now that the center is ready to reopen, how will the horses react to returning? | Photo: Courtesy James Lockwood

Q. I am from the small community of Bonsall, California, and a neighbor of the San Luis Rey Training Center that fire swept through in December 2017, resulting in the deaths of more than 45 horses. There’s some urgency to move the surviving horses back to the training center from their temporary stabling, so many will be back as soon as April. I have considerable concern over how stressful that might be for them; I was there that day, and any of the video I have seen, as dramatic as it is, doesn’t come close to portraying the terror of it all.

The training center will not yet be completely rebuilt and cleaned up when the horses return. The putrid smell of fire is still there, nearly two months on. The staff is very nervous that it may be hard for those horses to return. Barn fires are not very common in this area. Can you share any insight as a behaviorist or from experience with horses that survived a traumatic fire and returned to the property? –Stephanie, Bonsall, California

A. It would be great to hear from readers with similar experiences, where horses were released and ran off through burning landscape, kept elsewhere for a couple of months, and then returned to the farm. My direct ­experience with horses that survived fire is limited and certainly not on the scale of what you experienced. I have spoken to several veterinarian colleagues here on the East Coast who have been involved with barn fires. There have been situations where the fire was limited to one or more buildings on the farm, and there were horses in paddocks on the property, sometimes fairly close to where the fire and emergency chaos occurred, that never left their paddocks. Some were excited during the fire but seemed amazingly unaffected in subsequent days