‘We know that everyone’s horse is priceless to them’: life as a horsebox breakdown, rescue and recovery specialist

Equine Rescue Services provides horsebox breakdown, rescue and recovery and has a team of 10 incident managers. How we respond to a job depends on a lot of different factors and we look at the whole picture.

In the summer, you get a lot of ponies out with children – it might be one mum with four ponies and four kids, and it’s 9.30pm on a Sunday night. In that kind of situation you think, “It’s a woman on her own, so our priority is resolve the situation and get them safely home as quick as we can.”

If a customer breaks down on an A road, we ask them to call the police (if we call, it doesn’t go through to the correct force), who might close a lane or park the police car behind the horsebox, which provides a reassuring presence until we get there.

Every job is its own challenge. We had a 22-tonne lorry full of polo ponies, it was 11pm on a Sunday and the only lorries we had available were 3.5t, so we had to ferry them in pairs to a local livery yard and stable them until the morning when we had a big lorry available to get them on their way.

Those kinds of jobs are a challenge because you’re working with so many different parties – in that case, four different transporters, plus the police, plus Highways. We wanted to get there at the same time, so that we weren’t putting the ramp up and down on the broken-down lorry, which would have been unsettling for the horses.

If you break down on the motorway, we work with the National Highways. They can see the breakdown on their cameras, and I find that helps reassure people. As soon as it’s time for the actual recovery, they will close the motorway completely while the horses are being unloaded and reloaded.

Without our network of horse transporters, we wouldn’t be able to do our job. We had a call at 4am from a man taking a horse to the airport. He only had an hour and a half to make the flight, so I needed to get horse transport on its way within 15 minutes.

I called all the transporters who were closest to the breakdown and asked them one question – how quickly could they be there. Once I’d called them all, I booked the one that could get there soonest.

Then we were in the hands of the gods, because I didn’t know how quickly Highways could get there to close the motorway. It was a private flight, which they could only hold for 30 minutes. We got that horse there on time.

One of the most rewarding things for me is helping kids who are riding at team events. Once, a family was on their way to the Pony Club mounted games qualifiers, which is really close to my heart as I did mounted games when I was a child. I knew how hard they’d worked to get that far, and we got them there in time and they qualified. They sent me the biggest thank you card, saying “Sandy, you’re a legend!”

No two jobs or days are the same

Every day brings something different. We dealt with a horse that had gone down in the box and was trapped. This involved the need for veterinary assistance, police to close the road, fresh horse transport and the fire brigade in case assistance was needed to release the horses.

The road was closed for 90 minutes as all the emergency services worked together to release the horses and get them transferred to our transporter. We had a very thankful customer and, to everyone’s relief, the horse recovered.

We’re so much busier than when I first started. Last year, we responded to 3,600 incidents and this year, I would estimate that we will be in the region of 3,800. You can imagine how many phone calls we receive.

We have a lot of very famous equestrians on our books. We have many members who are household names, equestrian celebrities and professional riders, but everyone is a VIP in our eyes. We know that everyone’s horse is priceless to them.

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