Tippecanoe County Animal Control Officer April Keck said she, along with personnel from Indiana Horse Rescue, removed the animal from 8218 S. County Road 550 East, where it was discovered Monday in bad shape.
An official with Indiana Horse Rescue confirmed that at 6:30 p.m. the horse, about 6- to 8-years-old, was on its way to the group’s stables outside Frankfort.
Tippecanoe County Animal Control received a complaint on Monday that one horse appeared to be dead and another malnourished in the pasture.
Keck investigated Monday afternoon and recommended that the horse be removed immediately before it too died.
James Fitzsimons, owner of the horses, has declined to comment.
“He is going to surrender ownership of the horse, and we are going to continue the investigation,” Keck said. “We’re going to get the horse care and find out what’s going on with the horse before we decide whether to charge (Fitzsimons.)”
Large animal neglect is a Class A misdemeanor and, if arrangements aren’t made within 24 hours to dispose of a dead horse, that can be charged as a felony.
“Basically he stated he ran out of hay with the extra long, cold winter and was unable to find any in the community that he could afford,” Keck said of Fitzsimons.
Keck said the owner intends to bury the dead horse on his property. Although Keck doesn’t anticipate the need for a necropsy, if one is required, the horse will be exhumed.
From here the living horse — with its visible bones and gaunt figure — will be cared for at Indiana Horse Rescue’s Frankfort facility, where caretakers will attempt to nurse it back to health. The horse faces a long recovery process, and survival is far from assured.
“Sometimes they’re too far gone,” said Kathryn Caldwell, a founding member of Indiana Horse Rescue. “We can only hope that we can rehabilitate him.” A veterinarian was scheduled to pay a visit on the horse Thursday, she said.
Of those starving horses receiving the best of veterinary care, up to 20 percent may still die during the grueling recovery process, according to information from the University of Tennessee’s Extension Program.
Caldwell said Monday that the nonprofit didn’t have enough money to accept the horse at its Frankfort or Owensville facilities. But after the Journal & Courier report on the case Monday at www.jconline.com, donations started to roll in.
As of Tuesday afternoon, just shy of $350 for a month — the amount the organization needs to house a typical horse — had been raised. The catch: This isn’t a typical horse.
“With an emaciated horse, that $350 just covers the first month” of care, Caldwell said. An emaciated horse would cost “upward of $1,500 to $2,000 to rehabilitate him, minimum. Hopefully donations continue to come in.”
Nancy Lee of Otterbein, after reading about the horses, contacted Keck to offer about 25 bales of hay.
“When people hear of animals in bad situations, I think it’s a natural response to want to help,” Lee said. “I know there are many circumstances that lead to people getting in over their head when it comes to caring for pets and/or livestock. I just wish they would reach out for assistance or find homes for the animals before the situation reaches the point of suffering.”
Although the worst is likely behind the surviving horse, the recovery process won’t be easy, said Dr. Janice Kritchevsky, a professor and veterinarian at Purdue University’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
A horse in that condition has to be fed carefully for two reasons, she said. First, the horse’s intestinal tract, which uses bacteria to digest food, must be nursed back to health before the horse resumes its natural diet. Secondly, a hungry horse will happily eat beyond its limit, possibly killing itself or causing other complications.
“You start them on alfalfa hay and slowly work them up to a normal diet,” Kritchevsky said. “A lot of horses don’t survive the process.”
If fed too quickly, horses can undergo “refeeding syndrome,” in which the malnourished horse’s system rejects food because of how jarring the transition is from its former diet. Heart, kidney or liver failure may result, leading to possible death within days.
To avoid that, starved horses must be fed frequent, small meals and be weened over time to less frequent, larger meals.
According to the University of Tennessee, a starved horse can safely gain a half pound to a pound a day, and it may take up to one year for a horse with a rating of one or “poor” — the most severe rating on the Henneke condition scoring system for horses — to get to a healthy rating of five.
Horse starvation is more of a problem in the late winter and early spring months, when horses are unable to forage to supplement their diet. In the case of the horses at the Fitzsimons’ home, the grass had been mostly chewed away, and the horses had resorted to eating tree bark, which has virtually no nutritional value.
“A horse in Indiana out to pasture would need a huge pasture,” Kritchevsky said. “They’d need a supplement of some sort of hay and grain. If they are chewing away lots of bark, that’s telling you they are pretty hungry and looking for more food.”
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(Journal and Courier - April 9, 2014)
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