Plan to safeguard family’s horses

The 2019 Huon fires in Tasmania prompted Sophie Brouwer to develop her own detailed bushfire plan, setting out colour-coded maps and assembling a resource kit for the family’s horses and vehicles. Find out more here.

Sophie Brouwer with her horses, Seally, Silver and Brian.

When dry lightning strikes ignited fires in Tasmania’s Huon Valley in January 2019, the showground at Ranelagh, about 40km southwest of Hobart became a sanctuary for animal owners.

Local pony club rider Sophie Brouwer, 24, was one of the volunteers helping people who fled there with horses, sheep, goats, chickens, dogs and cats. Huon District Pony and Riding Club leases the ground from the local show society.

Yet, for weeks during the summer bushfire threat that plunged areas south of Hobart into the semi-darkness of an inescapable smoke haze, Sophie held fears for her own family’s horses. She travelled daily from her home in Cygnet to check on four horses on two properties at Margate owned by her parents, who were cruising in New Zealand at the height of the bushfire.

“It was good to get out for a couple of hours of respite from the smoke,’’ she said.

She and her mother had evacuated a relative’s horses from a bushfire at Snug in the early 2000s, dealing with horses unsettled by helicopters flying overhead in the smoke.

The 2019 fires prompted her to develop her own detailed bushfire plan, setting out colour-coded maps and assembling a resource kit for the family’s horses and vehicles, a plan she has shared at rallies of the Huon and Huntingfield pony clubs.

A part of the plan is the relationship with a “fire buddy” on a horse-friendly property more than an hour’s drive away, at Bagdad in Tasmania’s southern Midlands. “It’s also good to desensitise your horses to things like fire trucks driving past and fire fighters in uniforms and being handled by strangers,’’ Sophie said.

Plan A is to evacuate horses to Bagdad, where her friend Bree Bisset is a volunteer on the local fire brigade. In the event of a fire threatening Bagdad, Bree’s horses would be evacuated south to be with Sophie’s family’s horses.

Plan B is to tag the horses with bright orange identity tags plaited into a trimmed mane or tail and leave them to roam across an area of more than 2.5 ha (10 acres), by opening all internal gates and cutting fence lines to a neighbour’s paddocks.

Sophie’s kit is filled with fencing tools, cable ties, scissors, permanent markers, and printed copies of maps, laminated signs to put on external gates and fences, printouts of the fire warnings, UHF radios, spare keys, a battery-operated AM radio, electrolytes, feed and lists of safe places.

Sophie, who was shortlisted for a Pony Club Tasmania award for sharing her planning experience with other riders and horse owners, hopes she never has to activate it.

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