[QUOTE=danceronice;6087112]
As you can see from the I-40 thread, ThatGuy, I don’t object to slaughter as a universal rule. I DO have a problem with lying to obtain horses (and apparently money, too) from owners under pressure to send them to a good home. Sending horses to slaughter’s not illegal. FRAUD, on the other hand, definitely is.[/QUOTE]
You hit the nail on the head with this!
that guy, take your trolling elsewhere. I’ve rehomed not one but 25 OTTBs over the past ten years and guess what? I know where EVERY one is today. I own two who will die with me, hopefully many years from now. Your ill-placed devotion to defending a felon is sweetly nauseating, like drinking absinthe. Now run along and you and Kelsey go on about your last days together before she moves to the Graybar Hotel.
Isn’t it nice when what goes around comes around?
Here’s hoping she does time for this.
And perhaps it’s because I don’t live in thatguyland that I have no idea how buying a $20,000 warmblood “instead of doing something to correct the problem at hand” is somehow on a par with lying to obtain horses and sending them to slaughter to line your own pockets.
GSF
I am gonna jump in here with a little perspective. I board both Lad and Petey at Great Scott. Kelsey had been a new addition within the last 4 weeks or so, and I hadn’t met her as it was Lad’s winter vaca, and I was on a statewide truck hunt. So my nights were not spent, as they normally are, at Great Scott.
Connor and Lindsay are great people. The barn is by far the friendliest I have ever been at. I never met Kelsey, or if I did I didn’t know it. She taught 8 lessons since she was hired and was let go in a hurry when they got wind of the article.
As the follow up article states, they did check her references and she did check out clean. I will say since I have been in constant contact with Lindsay and Connor since this news broke that they were completely shell shocked and are still processing it. Lindsay has known Kelsey for a while and never knew about this side of her.
To be very clear, Kelsey was only on site at the time of her scheduled lessons. She didn’t handle any of the barn’s day to day interractions with horses. She walked in, helped people get tacked if needed, taught, helped untack and left.
That said I would hope all here understand that Great Scott is doing all they can to reassure the area at large that they never allowed Kelsey any kind of significant access to their horses or anyone else’s.
~Emily
I don’t think anyone has said anything against Great Scott in this thread, have they? Gosh, I hope not, as it does appear the farm acted very quickly to rid themselves of her.
I think That Guy is just playing troll, ahhhh some folks just can’t help themselves, poor sad creatures - sitting in their clutter-filled homes all by themselves, with nothing but the computer to keep them company.
I know this is terribly spiteful but I really do hope Kelsey is unable to get another job in the horse industry, in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. Hmm, perhaps she won’t, what with the publicity this has received.
I know Kelsey personally, we were never really friends, but I probably know her better than a lot of people. This is not at all surprising to me. Not one bit.
I knew she was bad, but I just thought that there was nothing to be done about it. I never really thought anything would go this far. Even though I knew how bad she was at one point, I really had started to believe she was getting more into the rescuing business, and trying to be legit with her doing parades, showing at Devon, and becoming an instructor. I knew she was still buying/selling horses but I didn’t know she was still selling at NH.
Like someone said, it’s not the slaughter that’s an issue. It’s the deception that is the problem. It’s every horse owners worst nightmare. Rehoming a horse, thinking it will be the best thing for them, and then finding out they were shipped for meat. It’s horrible.
The thing about Kelsey is that she’s fairly charismatic. She can really manipulate people, and she is likeable. It’s easy to fool people when you have those things going for you.
The things I’ve seen from her though… they make my blood boil just thinking about them. The mistreatment of the poor horses. Chezzie, I’m not surprised at the condition of your boy. Glad he found a nice home.
ETA: I think Great Scott Farm handled this situation perfectly.
I do not see how anyone could think ill of Great Scott Farm, this was all just brought to light, how could they possibly have known?
Please tell the owners there, they did a good thing in a bad situation…kudos to them.
Not on this thread, but in the internet world the initial news that she’d been an instructor there caused a lot of UGLY mud slinging to come towards GSF.
It wasn’t stated that she was new and still on her probationary period, but man what people say in their “passionate moments.”
I will pass the well wishes on this afternoon. I know they still need to hear that a lot of smart horse people saw their immediate termination as a good thing.
You know there was a line from a movie that always stuck with me, and I ahve to paraphrase but,
“Sometimes the bad things are just easier to believe. The good things take more work to believe in”
~Emily
Last night when I looked, That Guy had exactly 11 posts. One to resurrect a 2+ year old trainwreck and 10 on this thread. Methinks…
I agree that GSF did a great job by ridding themselves of Kelsey. I’m sure she was just active enough on the legit side to keep horses coming her way to ship up north. My biggest concern is how many more of them are there out there?
PROBABLE CAUSE AFFIDAVIT AND CHARGES AGAINST KELSEY LEFEVER
For those interested in reading the entire affidavit, the Paulick Report has made the 18-page document available by clicking
lifesabreeze, thanks for posting the PC affidavit. I read through it, and it was simply heart breaking 
[QUOTE=Dispatcher;6087728]
geez. Only 23 years old. Awfully young to have become such a despicable person. Wonder where she learned how to be that way so quickly.
She’s got a long road ahead of her. I hope its’ VERY long and VERY miserable. And without horses.[/QUOTE]
I thought the exact same thing. How does someone at 23 get so bitter, so deceptive and cruel, and at the same time so savvy and able to carry on with this “business” for so long? Sad. Agree with your post, on all points. I hope she finds her spot in hell sooner than later.
2nd edit as I am still mulling over of this over - when these horses were seen on the trailer and the tattoos were written down. I thought that horses then have to be held on a feedlot before they can be shipped to slaughter? If so, why were they not pulled off that feedlot? I think (not certain) that the kill buyer holds them on his property.
Also, she typically only puts a few months training into her horses before they are up for resale. They are then usually sold in the $2k range. So how would it benefit her to sell them to a meat guy for a few hundred? She has the resources to come up with $20k in bail money, so I find it hard to believe that she needed $300ish each for 4 horses.
Maybe I am just in denial because I know and like her - but it just doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.
Alex, I don’t doubt that she has reschooled and sold horses, give your horse a big hug today, he’s one of the lucky ones.
Actually selling horses to good homes made her credible, and put a little money in her pocket. We don’t know the condition of the other horses she picked up. A bowed tendon, and other injuries will make it hard to resell, period. Add in the time to rehab and it’s a losing proposition if you are trying to make money fast.
They have her texts stating what she did with those horses. After spending almost 30 years on the track, and meeting someone who reminds me of this girl I’m saddened, but not the least bit shocked.
And remember, she didnt have to pay that 20 grand out of her pocket. I would guess that she (or someone else) paid a percent to a bail bonsman to get out of jail.
She only has to come up with a precentage of the actual bail…and puts up collateral to a Bail Bonds person for the rest. $20k shouldn’t have been hard to find w/ 120 @ $300.00 each plus the 150 horses she sold for say $2,000. each
If it was cheaper and easier to make $2k, the sounder more marketable horses would have been or were sold that way. Although the profit margine to keep, shoe, feed train and market a horse for say 60-days does lower the profit margine. She was known to take whatever they gave her, that I got straight from a trainers mouth. I bet she took the marketable ones and got them “Done” by other means and only sent to “Kill” buyer those who weren’t clean legged of a certain age group not big or pretty…JMHO here.
This investigate was going on for quite some time and was not a quick slander campaign/poster child scare deal. To many horses disappearing down a rat hole in to short a space of time. We vilified a trainer on Business as Usual thread and this young woman is no better.
What we can do is keep an open thread with names like hers and Mark Bliss going as a reference of “Beware” Like the place on Webb where you look for a Plumber???
FWIW, this story was public several months ago, it just got no attention.
Judy-I think that is an excellent idea!
It is unfortunate that the really skilled sociopaths can seem charming and honest. I think everyone gets duped at least once in their life by one. Especially one with excellent references.
As someone had stated before, when asking for references, you do need to ask some detailed questions, especially how well the reference really knows this person.
One of the warning bells for me was from a former boarder who seemed fairly normal. After she moved in, it was the little things that seemed odd-like asking me if I wanted to go on a vacation with her and her family when we only had a business type relationship. Then she told me she had her mother put me down as a reference when she applied to work at a feed company in sales. She told me to tell them her mother was an experienced horse person when that was not the case at all.
Too bad the company never called me. I would have told them the truth.
Thanks for posting Alex S. It’s good to hear from someone who actually knows her. I don’t but your post doesn’t surprise me-- there aren’t too many moustache twirling villains in real life. They can come with a smile and say all the right things and even cover themselves enough for a google search.
Which is why I’d cut the owners, trainers and tracks a break in this terrible situation.
[QUOTE=Pronzini;6090052]
Thanks for posting Alex S. It’s good to hear from someone who actually knows her. I don’t but your post doesn’t surprise me-- there aren’t too many moustache twirling villains in real life. They can come with a smile and say all the right things and even cover themselves enough for a google search.
Which is why I’d cut the owners, trainers and tracks a break in this terrible situation.[/QUOTE]
Exactly. I’m sure she SEEMED nice. People doing things they know are illegal (lying to owners at zero-tolerance tracks with intent to defraud them into giving up horses) are not going to go around cackling like the Wicked Witch. And as I’m sure she was NOT, despite what people might call her, doing this just because she’s an evil person and hates the horsies, we hates them, Precious! She had ones she figured she could make money off of as resales, so she sold them that way. But if she could pick up horses that had no resale value for riding and sell them off for slaughter right away while still making a profit, she apparently saw no reason not to do that, too. The owners and trainers knew there were horses she did resell to riding homes like the people posting on here, so why would they suspect HER of taking the horses with bows or age or who just didn’t seem salable directly to New Holland or the broker’s truck? They move the horse to what they think is a good resale barn, she takes the ones that are harder to place/unplaceable and ships they directly to Canada or the auction, saving herself the overhead of keeping them around for a while, and she THINKS no one’s the wiser.
Alex S., it might not add up to you, but contrary to TV crime shows, it’s NOT a cakewalk to get probable-cause warrants, so it apparently DOES add up to the police.
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