When sisters Marlene and Darlene Telfer decided it was time to harvest some of the timber in their Thames Centre wood lot, they opted for a kinder, eco-friendly approach to removing some of the towering hardwoods.
Rather than employing the services of a company using potentially damaging machinery to harvest trees, the sisters contracted with a Stouffville company that uses the age-old methods of logging with horses.
"This is one of the least invasive ways to cut trees in a wood lot and haul them out," said Marlene Telfer yesterday as she watched a team of powerful Belgians at work.
"There are good ways and bad ways to log out a bush and this is an environmentally sound way to do it," added Darlene Telfer.
The sisters were not aware of logging with horses until they talked to John Enright, the forester with the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority.
Enright told them about Arbor North, a logging firm operated by Art Shannon, an accredited forest technician.
The company specializes in harvesting selected hardwoods in Southern Ontario bush lots.
Shannon is a multi-generational horse logger, carrying on a family tradition of working with horses.
"It goes back to my great grandfather, my grandfather and my dad," he said.
When he started in the timber, Shannon used machinery, but didn't like the impact it was having on the bush.
"It was hard to live with . . . the environmental damage," he said. "So I went back to what my dad and grandfather did and started using horses."
He found horses are ideally suited to logging the bush lots in Southern Ontario, where single trees are selected for harvesting.
Trees are picked for removal with an eye to encouraging new growth and improving the long-term the health of the bush. With this approach, diseased and damaged trees go first.
"Using horses, we can take out individual trees and not do any damage to the trees that are to be left," explained Shannon.
He believes horse logging is proving its value more than ever because global climate change means the soil in wood lots no longer freezes solid during the winter. That leaves the ground prone to damage by the large machines used in mechanized logging, he said.
"You can only imagine the compaction of the soil and the damage to the roots caused by machinery. Pulling the logs out with horses, you don't get any of that."
Shannon speaks from both the heart and head about using horses for logging.
From a practical standpoint, horses provide 20 years of service without major breakdowns, he said.
"Speaking from the heart, working with horses is a fun job. Each horse is an individual and it's so much nicer working with them than a large piece of equipment."London Free Presse
