First Responders Learn About Livestock

Ohio Country Journal:

Thursday, more than 150 first responders received training to understand how to handle livestock and wildlife during emergency situations during Ohio Farm Bureau’s Animal Agriculture 202: Farm Animal Handling for First Responders. Ohio State University Extension cooperated in offering the educational event, which was made possible with a grant from the Animals for Life Foundation.Animal Agriculture 202 provided a basic understanding of farm animal behavior and handling for law enforcement officers, animal control officers, firefighters, response teams, vets, county emergency management officials and other first responders who may need to handle livestock during emergency situations.
“When you are in the face of an emergency, that is not the best time to be learning,” said Leah Dorman with the Ohio Farm Bureau Center for Food and Animal Issues. “This is really about how to keep the public and the animals safe and how to handle those animals to the best of our ability.”
Training like this is becoming important as rural and urban communities are not as far apart as they used to be.
“Many Ohio citizens are three to four generations removed from the farm,” said Mike Bumgarner, also from The Center for Food and Animal Issues. “This training is the basic understanding of how animals move and react to certain situations. Years ago things like that used to be a natural instinct as more people were around livestock, today it is not.”

Luckily, our local sheriff's office has a deputy who lives on a farm. He often gets dispatched when there are livestock issues, and he sometimes gets a trailer and takes the animal or animals to his farm until the owner is located. I learned this after I had a couple of cows get out. I called the sheriff's office to see if any animals were reported, and they told me the deputy had them on the trailer. When I asked them where they were found and was told it was 8 miles away, I said they couldn't be mine. They gave me the deputy's cell phone number, and I called him. He had me describe them, then said, "Yep, I got 'em." He was on his way home with them on the trailer, so I gave him directions to my house and he dropped them off. Can't complain about public servants like that.