Sickness prevention in horses, a free online course is being offered by Canada’s Equine Guelph to horse owners in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The course usually costs $C85 and is available from March 21- May 31 on thehorseportal.ca.

The course will help you reduce the odds of sickness in your horses, gaining practical knowledge on ways to keep your horses healthy and protected from getting sick. This course will detail the key issues surrounding biosecurity, and infection control in the horse industry and how you can prevent the spread of disease. For instance, how many people wipe down the chains and snaps on cross-ties with disinfectant to reduce the risk of disease spread?

This course is based on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) National Farm and Facility Level Biosecurity Standard for the Equine Sector. CFIA develops national biosecurity standards, protocols and strategies in collaboration with producer organizations, provincial/territorial governments, and academia.

In this time of social distancing and health awareness, this course will help you understand how to minimize health risks for your horses by using some of the same techniques.

“Those who have read and follow those guidelines may well lament over the number of facilities that immediately introduce an unknown horse into its herd with complete optimism that nothing will go wrong. In this time of heightened alert, all reliable sources of education to prevent sickness are our salvation. We all can and must take steps to safeguard health of both humans and animals,” Bellamy-Zions says.

“Just what do you say to someone who comes back from their boarding barn search with the complaint, ‘Oh, it’s a lovely facility but they want to quarantine my horse for the first month — that will be inconvenient and I want my horse to have group turn-out.’?

“The COVID-19 outbreak has made us all keenly aware of the importance of physical distancing as a crucial way to prevent the spread of disease.  Asymptomatic (no evidence of symptoms) does not equate to no health risk to others.”