By Nicole Schoen
Two months ago RVR Horse Rescue, located in Riverview, launched a new campaign called C.L.E.A.R. with the purpose of providing a voice for mistreated animals by educating the public on how to help. C.L.E.A.R. stands for Care, Learn, Educate, Act and Rescue. Still under construction, the campaign provides information through links on its website with contact information for services across Florida that protect abused animals.
“It gives people more information on what to do about if they run into something,” said Shawn Jayroe, founder of RVR Horse Rescue and the C.L.E.A.R. campaign. “With horses, people normally turn their backs because they don’t know what to do about it and think somebody else will do it. That’s a problem. A horse is a whole different thing. You can’t call animal services because they don’t deal with horses.”
Jayroe came up with the idea years ago when she owned Hair Perfections in Temple Terrace to fund her home horse rescues before founding RVR Horse Rescue in 2005. She would run advertisements in the newspaper with information about how to help horses. Then a few years later, one of the volunteers at RVR Horse Rescue, Karen Tack, came up with the C.L.E.A.R. slogan and they meshed their ideas together.
Another resource on the C.L.E.A.R. website is a Henneke Scale which is used to evaluate the condition of a horse by analyzing several areas of its body. The scale ranges from one being extremely skinny to nine being obese with an ideal score being a five with anything between a four and a seven being acceptable.
The website also details steps one should take to collect evidence to equip law enforcement and animal control to help the animals. These include taking photos of the mistreated animal and its conditions, being aware of the law in the state the animal is in and documenting facts about everything witnessed.
“My goal for C.L.E.A.R. is to create awareness so that people know what to do when they see (animal abuse), to let people know there is somewhere to go to figure it out,” said Jayroe. “We are working on going nationwide with it for every single state.”
For more information about the campaign or how to help, visit rvrhorseres cue.org/clear, face book.com/ClearRvrHorseRescue or call 280-9299.
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