KPH Safety First
As a forward-thinking company, we continually strive to manufacture quality horseboxes that are safer, reduce stress and have increased durability.
The KPH innovative safety designs have many years of research and development behind them.
Over the next few months, we will post some of our research topics including insights, and considerations that we use to design safer horseboxes
Hopefully, these topics will be something horse owners will find insightful and interesting.
8. Horse Transport Stress
As we continue to prioritise safety, quality, and durability, the reduction of transport stress has been one of our long-term goals.
It is well documented that transport stress can cause serious illness in horses, and longer journeys create higher levels of stress.
Our research findings
It is clear that if you are taking a horse on a journey, it adds a degree of transport stress and the longer the journey the worse the effects become. Our findings showed that stress of any kind lowers a horse’s resistance to disease and the consequences can make them vulnerable to colic, diarrhoea, laminitis, pneumonia, or gastric ulcers. Transport stress can also lead to behavioural issues.
From our research it is clear we cannot eliminate all contributors to stress. As a manufacturer we can only design for those that are directly associated with loading and the actual physical horse area. As examples, the duration of the journey, breaks, watering, feeding and driving styles are all outside of our control. For the items within our scope, we have looked at each part of the build; including the physical layout of the horse area and direction of travel, to the angle and width of the ramp.
Designing the horse area in our horseboxes
In this series of blogs, we have individually covered many topics where our designs directly confront the adverse effects of transport stress and how we reduce it. These include sight, sound, vibration, grip, heat, and ventilation.
Being aware and having good knowledge of the key causes of transport stress means we can better tweak our horse areas, with the ultimate goal of customers arriving at their destination with healthy and happy horses!
Food For Thought…
Safety, and primarily horse safety, is at the forefront of everything we do. We research carefully and design our horseboxes accordingly. Having said that, transport stress is a vast subject and if there is something we have missed or something you would add, we would very much love to hear from you.