Horse/tornado protocol?

several years in central Oklahoma and in Southern Michigan (like #2 tornado area) taught me this.... turn em out. If the barn blows over you don't have a chance. Of course if you tucked in a suburb with close hoses and small corrals... it's a toss up.

On the ranch and the smaller place up north... they could ride it out in a pasture big enough to have a chance.

I live on the outskirts of tornado alley, so we rarely get tornados. Maybe 1 or 2 mild ones a year. They don't cause very much damage... but we do have a plan. Our pastures are about 15-20 acres each and can be overlooked from the barn, so the horses are never out of site. If there are any horses inside, they usually get turned out. If they were in a stall, they could get easily get spooked and kick the walls... making the other horses nervous and encourage their behavior. If they're let out into a pasture, they have room to buck it out and avoid the tornado at their own pace. I personally think it would be rare for a tornado to hit a 20 acre pasture specifically, but it's always good to be safe!

The storm would usually come with lightning or thunder and rain, so it would be good for the horses to go into the pasture anyway. Our pasture has lots of slopes, so the horses have cover from the wind. It depends on the barn, horses, location, field, and severity of the storm though.

I live in tornado country, but not the worst part of it.

There are three scenarios to consider. 1. The tornado misses you entirely. 2. The tornado goes near you, but doesn't take out your barn. 3. The tornado takes out your barn.

Personally, I like to put the horses IN the barn if there is time, but if there isn't time to do it safely, they're on their own (they're pastured with run-ins, so they do have shelter). If I'm injured/killed putting them in, I'm not going to be much use to them afterwards, now am I?

A near miss is MUCH more likely than a direct hit, but in a near miss there's a lot of debris flying around. Even with my 10 acre pastures, there's no way the horses can avoid it - it's coming too fast, from too many directions. That debris can easily be deadly to a horse in a field. The barn may get damaged, but it provides substantial protection from flying debris.

If there's a direct hit that takes out the barn, then it would have killed the horses in the fields as well. People who say turn them out underestimate the destructive capacity of these storms - even if the tornado itself doesn't suck them into the sky, the flying debris will destroy them outside. Tornados are not little dust devils, they can be a mile across. Even the small ones are going to cover pretty near the whole field.

If the tornado misses us altogether, great. No harm... UNLESS you've listened to someone who told you to open all the gates so the horse could escape the storm! Then you have a horse out running the open roads. That's a bigger danger than the storm. You may never find them. Someone may run into them and get hurt/killed. Not a good plan at all, no matter the outcome.

So my protocol is: check the reports, and cast a weather eye at the sky. If it looks doable, put the horses in. If it looks unsafe, go to the basement and cross my fingers. And wish I had enough money for a bank barn, so the horses would be in a basement too.

I'm not sure WHAT I'd do. Our paddocks are small (roughly 1 acre apiece) and there is no shelter. Leaving the gates open doesn't guarantee that the horses would run through them if they needed to, especially since the storm itself might come from that direction. Our barn is a very sturdy mid-1960s block building that looks indestructable. I think I's be tempted to bring the horses in, but I'd be worried about the glass in the windows. On the other hand, 1 acre doesn't provide much room for outrunning a storm. As Starlight said, however, tornadoes in our area are infrequent and relatively weak (I don't think we've ever had one above F-1.)

I grew up in the Midwest, Kara, on the northern end of what is commonly called "Tornado Alley". As a child, I learned to respect the wind at a very early age, and I also saw my share of bad storms over the years. I currently live on the East Coast, in the Mid-Atlantic region, and while tornadoes aren't common in my state, that doesn't mean they don't happen at all. We generally leave our horses outside, even during periods of stormy weather, because they have a shed that they can go to. My thinking is that the horses are safer outside than they ever would be if they were confined in their stalls, because at least they can run if they're outside. In the nearly 9 years I've been here, we have never had issues with anyone getting hurt in a storm.

Well I don't really no any certain protocol except making sure they have good shelter try can go into. My horse is always outside in a paddock with others we don't stall him in a barn although he has access to a couple shelters

I live in Cali and we don't get tornados but we do get fires. When we have a fire nearby all the horse people team up and locate who has stalls / arena / room and everyone gets on facebook with what trailers / situations they can help with.

Last year a fire came really close. I took a black sharpie marker and wrote my last name, phone number on the horse in permanent ink on his butt and got my little 2 horse trailer hitched and waited up all night watching the fire.

I have no experience with horses or tornadoes or farms, or any of that.

But, put the horse in the barn.

Lived in Kansas for four years. Horses were put in the barn with the windows open.