Putting Information and Technology into Work for Transport

Johann Sigurdson, CEO of Aero-Equis Inc. started his technology presentation at the Animal Transportation Conference, held March 18-21, with a great introduction on how human beings can get so easily confused with all the information that is being pushed into our brains all the time, and especially the huge amount of misinformation in our information age.He used a wonderful quote to make his point: "A fact that has been known for a long time and has wide geographic acceptance is usually wrong." He is using more high-tech methods to make the information that is coming in easier to access and utilize successfully.

He said that there are no standards or consumer specifications for the minimum space requirements for all the different types and orientations of trailers, nor for the amount of headroom for a specific sized horse. The way the pull bar is attached to the mainframe, the type of materials (wood, plastic, fiberglass, steel, aluminum, etc.), the flooring, the footing used in a trailer, the emergency escapes (for humans), and numbers of windows for ventilation...none of that is determined by anyone except the manufacturer in consumer trailers.

Then he got to the point of the talk: That manufacturers are putting trailers out there based on what consumers think they want, and they don't know what is best because there has not been any research and development, crash testing, or basic gathering of crash data for any horse trailers (check back for my presentation in an upcoming blog for the first treatment of some of that data on 800 wrecks).