Below is a comment posted by raftert to the Hooves Blog.  (In future – everyone – feel free to put together a short article on such subjects of interest and submit to:  thehoovesblog@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to post them for comments)  The comment is entirely off topic and rather than see it get buried or pull comments away from the article it’s posted under, I’m posting the comment here to be discussed.  Note that advice is being asked for.

This is off topic, but I’m hoping someone on here can give me some advice. I just heard about a group of horses in British Columbia that are in pretty dire straits. The SPCA visited there a number of times a few years ago but none of the horses were seized at that time. As is par for the course in our area, the SPCA is not really interested in helping horses, so I’m not surprised that nothing was done then.

There is approx. 30 horses on the property, many of which are young stallions. The stallions are kept in stalls, 24/7, in a very old barn without much light. The last time there were shavings on the property was in November. The horses don’t get trimmed, but their feet do rot off in the stalls, which are basically never cleaned. Halters are not removed as most of the horses are now unhandled, when the stalls do get cleaned, the owner simply herds the horse into a different stall. Some of the stallions have been inside for almost 20 years, and there has not been any turnout for approx 10 years now. The young colts are moved into the barn when they start breeding the mares, there are new foal crops every year and no idea who is bred to who. I would imagine none of the other basic care is being done, such as deworming, as most of the horses haven’t been handled.

20 years or so ago, this owner ran a really nice barn and the stock (AQHA) was quite high end and well cared for. Her mental health has apparently been declining (obviously) and she will no longer allow people she doesn’t know to even enter the property. So, while I would love to get in there to blow the lid off this, I can’t. As for the weight of the horses, I was not told they were starving or even significantly under weight, so I’m confident that the SPCA will not be of any help now either.

Because I am in a very small town, I also don’t want to be in the limelight. I can accept critisism for that, and it is what it is, and it’s not going to change. All that said, how does a person go about getting attention on this, when the society that’s supposed to protect these animals doesn’t and you can’t get onto the property to get the pictures which could force action from the society? Any advice would be appreciated!