Wednesday evening, 74-year-old Hammond, a Harrisonville resident, was charged with a horrific case of animal abuse, accused of dragging a horse more than a mile down 245th Street near Orient Cemetery Road behind his truck. The horse was badly injured and eventually died.
"In my 25 years, I’ve never seen an animal chained to a vehicle and drug," said Major Jeff Weber with the Cass County Sheriff's Office.
That changed Tuesday when a 911 caller claimed their neighbor was dragging a horse down the road by his truck. When they arrived, Cass County Sheriff's deputies found the horse - barely alive - and still chained to the truck, lying on the ground and badly bleeding. Hammond was arrested for animal abuse.
"I'm sorry that it happened. It's one of those things. She's be hurting somebody else if I hadn't taken a hold of her to try to straighten her out....It's a pretty bad deal, but that's the life of things and the way it goes," Hammond said.
Hammond says he knows horses and was only trying to train a horse that refused to behave.
"We just tried to subdue her and get her straightened out, and she just went berserk and everything...It was just fouled up," Hammond stated.
"So, you didn't tie her to the back of a truck?" KCTV's Jeanene Kiesling asked.
"Yes I did, right out here, to pull her out," Hammond responded.
Hammond said if you don't get "correction" from a horse it could kill you.
When he was arrested, he said "You're kidding, right?"
A Cass County deputy found the horse soaking in sweat with road rash on its skin and pools of blood coming from its feet.
Dr. Zachary Peterson, a veterinarian, treated the five-year-old horse.
"You could tell she had been through a lot," he said.
Peterson said her hooves were ground down, not to the bone, but close. Her skin in areas looked as if she'd been burned due to the friction from the road.
"At the end of the day, we wanted very badly to save this horse within reason. We weren't going to let her suffer," Peterson stated. "Where the skin was, it was almost if the skin had been burned. You could tell there had been a significant amount of heat involved."
But the horse was suffering, so, Wednesday morning, Peterson and his staff decided the horse should be euthanized. She died before they could perform the procedure.
"Were you trying to teach the horse a lesson?" Kiesling asked Hammond.
"Yes ma’am, trying to teach the horse a lesson from pulling back and breaking stuff," Hammond answered. "You take a 1,000 pound animal, she can do some damage. And this is what happens."
"Do you feel bad?" Kiesling questioned.
"Yes, I feel terrible about it...but it's just one of those things," Hammond responded.
Hammond is charged with felony animal abuse for torturing or mutilating an animal while it was alive. He posted his $10,000 bond.
(KCTV5 - April 29, 2016)
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