Ari Pakarinen works as an entrepreneur in a field that many people don’t even think about. Pakarinen’s company, which ended up in southern Sweden from central Finland, transports rakes and horses all over Europe.
Ari Pakarinen’s Åby Horseline’s blue horse-drawn carriages can be found all over Europe. Ville Toivonen
When there are big international trots in Europe, there are usually people there too Ari Pakarinenor at least his company.
The blue horse-drawn carriages of the Åby Horseline company are a familiar sight all over Europe, as Pakarinen is a prominent player in European horse transport.
It all started in the early 1990s, when Pakarinen, now 51, from Tikkakoski in Central Finland, worked as a trotting trainer Pekka Korven on. At that time, Korve also had a stable in Belgium, where Pakarinen worked as a horse groomer.
– From there we went around competing everywhere and at the same time got to know traveling in Europe and European trotting sports. And of course a lot of contacts, Ari Pakarinen recalls.
– Through many twists and turns, I ended up in Sweden and basically by chance to work for a horse transport company. Then the original employer was going out of business, and I bought the equipment from him and founded my own company.
Pakarinen started as an entrepreneur in 2001. The company named Åby Horseline got the Gothenburg race track Åby, because at the beginning Pakarinen’s main job was to transport the horses of trainers in the area to raves.
Very soon, however, the focus of the activity began to change in an international direction.
– Driving to trots decreased all the time, and it must have been in 2010 when I stopped the original trot transport operation completely. Since then, the focus has been mainly on trips abroad.
To France, Sweden and airports
Currently, Pakarinen’s company’s biggest employer is horse transport between Sweden and France. The countries are the big engines of European trotting, and the Swedes have had a lot of horses in France for a long time.
– There is a lot of driving between Sweden and France, and another big thing is air freight. Quite a lot of horses are flown in, both trotting horses and stallions, and they are taken to and from airports. Usually the horses fly from Liege or Amsterdam, to some extent also from Frankfurt.
Pakarinen currently has three nine-horse cars and a fourth is under construction. With a trailer, one car can transport 15 horses at once. There are seven employees.
– Driving time restrictions are exactly the same in animal transport as in other traffic. You can drive for four and a half hours at a time, after which there must be a 45-minute break, and you can drive a total of nine hours a day, Pakarinen explains.
– When we go from Sweden to France, there are usually two drivers, so the car does not have to stop, but can continue by changing drivers. Due to the regulations, going with one driver is quite slow.
Good employees are valuable in horse transport, because transporting horses is not a normal trucking.
– You have to know how to read a horse, you have to know how to drive a car, you have to get along with customers and preferably know a few languages, Pakarinen enumerates.
– Transporting horses is not just about putting them on board and going for a ride. You have to know how to read a horse.
Traveling with horses has to be planned carefully, because you can’t spend the night with a herd of horses at any resting place. Horses must be allowed to exercise regularly.
– We have our own smaller stable in Germany and in addition there is a bigger center in Holland that can be used. They are about halfway to France, it’s about 700 kilometers from Malmö, says Ari Pakarinen.
Problems are rare
Long transports are often considered risky, but according to Pakarinen, problems are very rare.
– The veterinarian has checked the horses before leaving, so they should at least be healthy when they go on the trip. Of course, someone always gets sick, but by the same token, people can get sick too. On an annual basis, we are also talking about individual cases in the number of horses we transport.
Pakarinen says that his company transported around 2300 horses last year. Each horse-drawn carriage has almost 200,000 kilometers on its odometer during the year.
– You really have to knock on wood, but nothing very bad has ever happened. The cars have never even spread out so well on the road that horses had to be unloaded somewhere on the side of the highway, says Pakarinen.
– There haven’t been any bad crashes, and not a single horse has died in a car. However, tens of thousands of horses have been driven, and we’ve managed to get there with surprisingly little. Of course, there have been smaller accidents and something always breaks down in cars, but nothing worse has ever happened.
Over the years, Ari Pakarinen’s cars have driven a countless number of the world’s best and thus also the most valuable horses.
– This is all about trust. That people can trust their horses to be transported by us.