In a functional operation, automatic waterers with heaters. In closer margins, stock tanks with heaters, sometimes the huge ones for cows/large herds. I’ve chopped ice daily on the creek for horses before but that’s pretty hardcore lol. If you’re feeding hay then usually there is a heated waterer around somewhere. If you’re doing the eat snow method you aren’t usually feeding hay and they are foraging (doesn’t work for cows, just horses). One of our neighbors used to run the horses out all winter (no hay) but would use a water tank to water them once a day. One of the neglect cases I tried to get attention would put a round bale out but they were filling a stock tank from a water tank in a pickup bed and then driving away for a few days so after the first few hours the horses had no water and gullets full of hay. It took many calls from me and the other neighbors on that one to get a response but no horses died while they were there, they must have done well enough on the snow but I wouldn’t do that to one of my horses.
From the comments in the now deleted FB group, from.people who worked for Mr Blatt before things went sideways, he fed hay in the wintet, and the horses either drank from the creek or had stock tanks, depending on which pasture they were in. And the oldies got soaked mashes if their teeth were bad.
An update:
The ASPCA has indicated that if they gain possession of the horses, they will allow at least some to go to breeding homes.
Also, Blatt pled not guilty to one count of felony aggravated animal cruelty on Monday.
If my assumptions are correct, the seizure doesn’t transfer ownership, but it does transfer full control over the herd to the county aka sheriff’s office. Is that right?
So – if I’m correct, that’s not confirmed as of this instant – technically Blatt still owns them. But he can do nothing with them, they are legally beyond his reach and control.
I am guessing that when the county reassigns ownership elsewhere, a court order will give ownership of the individual horses to new invidual owners. But not sure if this is how it works legally in that country.
I’m kind of fascinated by the behind the scenes legal status, in situations such as this.
You are correct; Blatt still owns the horses but has no control over them. The sheriff controls them - and she can bill him every 30 days for the expense of keeping them, which he might not want or be able to pay.
Oddly, the number seems to.have increased from 86 to 90. He does own (approximately) 4 other horses, including Otto, so I wonder if they’ve been added. Somewhere in that vanished FB group, someone who had worked for him said that intact male horses and the mares had been kept separate in 2024, so there shouldn’t be any foals in 2025.
What happened in the Hoskins case, in New York, is that when the horses finally needed to be dispersed, the court appointed a receiver to be in charge of that. No idea what would happen here, but could the ASPCA be appointed receiver?
This is a nightmare situation for the owner (and in this case, probably his family &/or helpers who may be making the real decisions, but we don’t know). Because the herd can continue to rack up bills, and it is all the owner’s responsibility. But the owner no longer has control over what is being done or what it costs.
It’s kind of like having the city condemn your aspirationally-bought empty falling-down house, and then send you the bill for tearing it down. Which cities do for the sake of protecting the community from the many problems of abandoned houses that overflow to vex the neighborhood – rodents; takeover by invasive plants; drug dealers; etc.
The same teardown house can simoultaneously be in mortgage arrears badly enough to end up in a foreclosure auction. The buyer at auction may or may not know that they are buying an empty lot with a teardown bill that the city sends to them, as the owner. As an auction bidder always do your research … anyway. (In real life, this has happened, people have bought a house at foreclosure auction, only to discover an empty lot and the city chasing them for the bill to remove the structure. There is zero duty to disclose at a foreclosure auction. The lender/seller may not even know. Nothing helps the buyer, this is what they bought, knowingly or unknowingly.)
The above is a situation analogous to the agister’s lien of the thread title. Had the herd gone to auction and someone bought it, they are buying the sheriff’s bills for caring for the herd. With no control of their own over their new acquisition of 86 horses. Unless they could convince the sheriff to turn the horses over to them, as the new, more responsible, owner.
The sheriff won’t pay any attention to liens etc. Neither will a city considering a house on its teardown list that is already in foreclosure. Not their problem.
So landowner Peterson was well advised to forget about trying to auction the herd against a lien. For himself to buy, or for someone else to buy. They would just have bought into the sheriff’s process, and probably the sheriff’s expenses, too. The owner is getting the bill. Whoever that is.
Of course the current herd owner Blatt put himself into this situation by a series of very bad decisions. But if information is correct, there may be medical issues behind it. Really tragic when this happens.
And doubly so when living creatures are the subject of the drama. But hopefully they are getting better care now. From the sheriff.
I’m thinking the sheriff will have to recover expenses from some kind of auction or sale. Assuming the law allows this – from brief internet reading, it sounds like selling off seized animals is a regular procedure in many Montana counties. Sometimes not long after seizure.
So at this point I’m guessing that these horses are eventually headed for other owners, other homes. Courtesy of the sheriff. Just speculation, though.
Update: the Sheriff took ownership of the herd this week, and the ASPCA will handle them find new homes. It appears that there will not be breeding restrictions put in place. I’m sure the AMHA will help with DNA typing and registration.
I can post links in the morning; it’s all over Facebook but I deliberately do not have Facebook on my tablet.
I’m still wondering what has happened to former herd sire Sweets Bayberry, who is now 31 or 32 and was in rough shape.
Thank you for the update.
Hopefully all of the horses land well.
I edited my post - the county Sheriff’s Department still owns the horses but the ASPCA is handling the dispersal.
Unfortunately it appears that they’re just trying to get them into new homes quickly, with no organized attempt at identifying parentage etc. Unless it’s already been done, but I doubt it. It would have been so much easier to get this with all the horses in one place. So only those with two registered parents can be registered. (Note I am inferring off a list of horses from the sheriff, where most are identified by a barn name only - but it appears that the 31 year old stallion Sweets Baybarry is correctly identified and still alive! And the youngest of the horses are coming 3, so when Mr Blatt’s health failed, the stallions and mares were already separated. This would have been an even bigger mess had there been a bunch of feral 2023 and 2024 youngsters, and mares in foal.)
Moana Morgans, which is nearby and has pretty deep pockets, had offered at one point to care for them and disperse them when ready, and I think they would have gotten the parentage worked out while doing so.
Well the ASPCA turned on us. They got applications and went through them, and put the approved ones into 3 groups. Anyone who breeds is in the third group.- which is the last to go. So by the time the breeders get to pick, the best stock, and probably anything registered, will be gone.
The first horses get picked up early next week. They made NO attempts to identify the registered horses or get DNA to try to get parentage figured out.
The Morgan community is in an uproar.
I have no idea what the reputation of the ASPCA is where all of this is happening.
Where I am located, in no way would that be a surprise by the ASPCA dealing with a lot of unclaimed animals in a hoarding or a disaster situation. I’ll stop there with the scuttlebutt as to why they are minded this way.
I wish the Morgan community luck with their uproar in having some sway over possible changes of procedure.
The horses are still in Montana at the same location. The ASPCA chose not to transport them to their nearest facility (in Oklahoma I think) because there are just too many and a lot of them are pretty close to feral.
ASPCA has an anti-breeding reputation but had assured people that there would not be breeding restrictions on most of the horses. But it’s all a technicality now.
Probably half of them are geldings, but there are a couple of stallions and some registered proven broodmares as well, as well as younger unregistered mares.
If they’re getting adopted next week, there really isn’t any time to change things.
I get that in their mind, every unaltered animal is destined to be the parent of a new shelter or rescue offspring … but sometimes a realistic view of the prospects would help everyone. Especially the animals. Especially if there are active rescue groups on hand, with proven reputations.
I’m guessing that even if they geld any stallions still in the group, they aren’t going to neuter the mares. And that is on their minds.
It is one-track thinking, for sure. There are some other standard assumptions they make, in various situations, that tend not to reflect the current reality.
That’s disturbing. I would think they would want to preserve the value of the horses, but they are treating them like they are all grade. If I’m remembering your past posts, these are good bloodlines. What a shame.
I read a comment on one of the Morgan groups that said they had pulled hair from all the horses. I don’t know if that’s absolutely true, but this person that commented isn’t a random internet person, she’s someone who knew Brian and purchased horses from him in the past.
This is sort of the reason I’m not against breeding a grade horse and getting the foal registered with a different association. Many good quality horses slip through the cracks, get separated from their papers and now you have this wonderful horse that can’t be registered.
Depending on the registry an older horse may not have DNA on file so finding lost papers is pretty difficult. You would hope most of these horses do have DNA on file, but even so, how would you get their papers in a situation like this?
It definitely is a shame to lose certain bloodlines, although it sounds like most of these horses are pretty feral (and may have medical issues) so it will be awhile before any of these horses are in condition to breed.
In Morgans, a horse with registered parents can be registered even if they don’t have their own DNA on file, which opens up possibilities not available through a lot of other breed registries.
Unfortunately this breeder has been in a years-long pissing match with AMHA and wasn’t keeping up with registering his horses despite breeding so many, so the herd is at the point where there are now unregistered horses from unregistered parents. Hence the hope that DNA ID would be done on some of the older unregistered stock with identifiable parents, to cascade to more of the younger ones once their parents were registered. It does sound like some will be successfully identified but some will fall through the cracks depending on where they end up.
IME – Preserving value, making sure that higher value horses get homes that will also preserve their future value, is what the ASPCA does not do.
They do not seem to like the idea that any animal has a dollar value. To the point where it is out of touch with reality.
In the horse world of many of us, a horse with a higher value inside of a breed group is likely to have a better home, and a better future, in that group.
But the ASCPA doesn’t seem to care. They seem to prefer an outlook that it doesn’t matter which horse ends up where.
IME.
I also think that the ASPCA and similar animal groups (not species specific) fall into the trap of treating horses like dogs and cats. Yes, most horses in the US are more like pets than livestock, but the way horses are valued and managed is entirely different.
There was a thread somewhere off COTH about a small animal vet that bought an equine practice and overstepped some bounds - mainly, putting something in the horse’s file about OA in hocks without a full lameness exam. While this isn’t a true diagnosis, it also wouldn’t be so impactful on a dog or cat as we don’t sell and insure those animals the same way. A horse with OA in the file can lose significant insurance benefits and take a HUGE value hit to the point of being unsellable - something not usually considered with a Yorkie that isn’t breeding or going for some title. Or maybe at all.
Treating horses like house pets is not a good way to protect them or keep them in good homes. They are livestock, though we may pamper them like overgrown labs.
