On Wednesday, on the Greenlee Road property rented by Bonnie Grindstaff, Timothy Hopson and others, a 25-year-old horse was found abandoned, starving and malnourished after it had been dropped off under the assumption it would be trained.
“I’ve never seen one that bad,” Hopson said. “Horses should not get in this bad a shape.”
Hopson discovered the horse after he had been contacted by a couple who expressed interest in an ad he placed on craigslist.com, in which he offered his services as a horse trainer.
After six months of infrequent communications with the couple, he said, he was contacted Wednesday and told they were bringing him the horse. Hopson said he gave them his address and drove out to meet them. As he was arriving, however, he said he saw a truck with a small trailer pulling out of his driveway.
“I wouldn’t have thought a horse was hauled in it,” he said. “It was an old cattle trailer, it had no top on it and two pieces of plyboard on the sides. I thought maybe someone had brought one of the other boarders some hay.”
Hopson said he continued onto his property and wondered where the couple was with their horse. When he looked inside the barn, he said, he knew the answer.
“I walked into the barn, and I’m shocked,” Hopson said. “There was a skeleton standing in the barn looking at me.”
Hopson then contacted Grindstaff, who lives adjacent to the horse barn, to ask for her help. When she first arrived, however, she said the sight of the horse was almost too much to bear.
“When you see something like that, and you’ve never seen something like that before, it was almost too much to take in,” she said. “It weighed down my chest; I couldn’t even suck on air. When I saw her, I was almost afraid to touch her. That’s how unreal it seemed.”
After Hopson contacted her, Grindstaff, in turn, contacted Cindy Chambers, a professor at East Tennessee State University’s special education program and local animal activist, to help secure the horse’s medical care. With the aid of the Humane Society of Washington County, the funding for a veterinary visit was secured and the horse was examined Thursday.
“The vet said they rate horses between 1 and 10, with 1 being emaciated and 10 being morbidly obese,” Grindstaff said. “She was a 1, and the next step is death. It’s very serious.”
In addition to the emaciation, however, the horse was suffering from other maladies, as well.
“She has a huge injury on her leg,” Grindstaff said. “Whatever it was, it didn’t heal right, so the whole leg has swollen up.”
Along with the physical injuries, HSWC President Lucinda Grandy said the veterinary exam revealed internal issues as well.
“Her bloodwork is normal,” Grandy said. “But she is anemic — which goes along with starvation — and she has tapeworms.”
By Friday afternoon, Grandy had arranged for a new home for the horse — who has been named Élan, which means courage — to live out her days in relative comfort.
“She’s part of the Humane Society now,” Grandy said. “She’ll be able to live, but she’ll be a yard pet. It’ll take a long time to get a little bit of weight back on her.”
While the horse’s future may be secured, Grandy and others said they will turn their attention to its past by locating its former owners.
“We’re going to find out,” she said. “This is appalling.”
Though the previous owners may have been responsible for the horse’s condition, Chambers added she was disappointed others did not do something to help the horse sooner.
“I am astonished and upset that we as a society would let an animal get to this point and, as critical as she is in her malnourishment, that someone didn’t step forward and some agency didn’t step forward to assist this animal earlier,” Chambers said. “But I am thankful this animal landed in our hands.
"With the support of the Humane Society and other interested community members, this horse is going to have a chance to live a quality life.”
(Johnson City Press - Sept 5, 2014)
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