Okay I’m contemplating whether or not to call the authorities on my fiancé’s friend for abusing his horse.
We have been around horses all of our lives, I love them as my pets and occasionally rodeo. However my fiancé uses horses for a living (catching cows mainly), but he also ropes calves and steers in rodeo and just for fun, as does his friend Ethan.
Well me, my fiancé, his friend Ethan, and about 5 other people were out trail riding in a few hundred acres of woods. Ethan had bought a black barrel horse from someone and was riding him on the trails that day (He bought the horse in hopes of being able to rope off of him). While riding I noticed that Ethan was using a handmade tie-down on his black horse, but it was a chain instead of leather. I didn’t say anything about it to him, but I did say something to my boyfriend and he pretty much just let it roll off of his shoulders.
Well we had been riding for about 2 hours and Ethan seemed to be getting pretty frustrated with his horse and rode off separately from the rest of us. Again, I didn’t think much of it.
Well we had gotten back to the truck and trailer; Ethan and 2 other guys that were riding with us hadn’t gotten back yet. Well after about 30 minutes they come back, but Ethan is riding along on the back of someone else’s horse.
Apparently the horse had tried to run off with him in the bushes and that made Ethan pretty mad. So Ethan and the 2 other guys roped the horse, laid him on his side, and tied his left- front leg, and his right-back leg up, and tied his reins to the saddle horn with his head pulled to the right side (they did all of this to keep the horse from being able to get up). They rode off and left the horse tied up on the ground (with the tie down made from a chain), in the woods, with no food or water for TWO DAYS. I had no idea what they had done with the horse until after we left, and I pitched a fit about it. Ethan was supposed to go get the horse the next morning (it was about 8:30 or 9:00 when we left), but he waited 2 days…
Okay as if that wasn’t bad enough, after he got the horse from the middle of the woods, he kept using the chain for the tie down every time he rode him, and the last time I saw that horse (about 4 days ago) the horse’s nose and jaw had a huge gash where the chain was cutting into him every time Ethan rode him, which I know was over 3 times. The chain would cut into him and leave a scab/scar, and then he would ride him again and the chain would cut further into the scab/scar, and the last time I seen him it was cutting into the meat. It took EVERYTHING I had not to say something to Ethan about it, but my fiancé said since it was his friend that he would handle it, which apparently he didn’t because today he went to Ethan to talk about buying that black horse for me as a barrel horse and he came back and told me that I wouldn’t want that horse because his face was cut up worse than he thought.
I have finally reached my breaking point and I don’t believe that Ethan should be allowed to keep that horse any longer, or any of his other horses for that matter.
Is this a situation where I should call some sort of authorities?
I don’t know what to do! Please help!
