It’s something you don’t even want to think about, especially if you love animals, and even more if you love horses.

The panic. The fear. The confusion. The smoke. The heat. The screaming. Then the pain. Then the silence.

Early Tuesday morning, 17 of these intelligent, graceful, beautiful animals were at one moment sleeping comfortably in their stalls. The next moment, they were trapped and condemned to death while fire raged in their barn on the grounds of the Saratoga Casino Hotel and harness track in Saratoga Springs.

Before another animal meets the same fate, state lawmakers and gaming officials need to take immediate steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Remarkably, the decades-old building filled with hay was not required under state law to have modern fire suppression systems in place to control a fire.

No sprinkler systems inside the barn. No alarms to alert the horses’ human handlers of an emergency that could have possibly saved some or all of the animals.

The barn that burned down Tuesday........

© The Leader Herald