Helping Horses Through Anxiety, Career Changes—and Quarantine
Lockdown sucks. Lockdown with 26-superfit Hunters and Jumpers who suddenly can only be hand-walked? That can be a potential powder keg of peril for horses and handlers. This blog article shares stories about helping horses through anxiety, career changes—and quarantine.
Helping horses through anxiety, career changes—and quarantine
When the Equine herpesvirus-1 (EHV-1) outbreak at Desert International Horse Park brought the Desert Circuit to a screeching halt, Erin Duffy Show Stables in Los Angeles, California, had 26 horses facing a lengthy quarantine. They went from five to six days a week of work with turnout to no work and zero turnout due to fear of airborne germs. “Just hand-walking in plastic suits,” says manager Lisa Cahn Jope.
Three things got her team through nearly two months of quarantine:
- Absolute dedication to the horses in their care
- A boatload of Clorox
Equine anxiety is even more contagious than EHV-1. Twenty-six horses stuck in their stalls with pent-up energy could “quickly escalate into a very bad situation,” says Jope. “They start kicking their stalls, looking for something to do. They could absolutely get anxious. It would have been very difficult to walk them.”
Jope’s crew worked in plastic rain suits, gloves, and booties to keep horses and people safe. They switched their entire plastic outfit between each horse. They continuously scrubbed their facility with Clorox.
“They were quiet and nice through the whole situation,” says Jope. “They were easy to handle for the most part, though there are always one or two renegades.”
After nearly two months and countless miles of hand-walking, when the quarantine was finally lifted, the barn threw a party.
Off-the-track thoroughbred Ultimate Prediction has proven to be “one of the most delicate horses, mind-wise, I’ve ever worked with,” says Wallace. There’s so much opportunity for people to use the product in training, he says: “With it, you can make a horse more willing, put him the zone, where he might be able to learn a bit instead of just ricocheting around from spook to spook.”
