UPDATE – It is always interesting to see how quickly things sometimes change after a location has been featured in an Animals’ Angels exposé. When AA investigators visited this ship pen in May, emaciated horses were kept in barren pens with empty food troughs. Groups of thin horses, some with injuries, roamed the adjacent woods looking for something to eat. After reporting the observations to local law enforcement and making these findings public on social media, the kill pen had to deal with a lot of fallout.
Last week, AA investigators returned to the location to once again check the conditions for the horses. What they saw was very different from their first visit: the pen area was not in use (except for one donkey in the front pen) and seemed to not have been used in a while. Approximately 35 horses were spotted grazing in the lush fields surrounding the barn, which now seems to be completely accessible to them. No horses were seen in the adjacent woods. No injured or emaciated horses were visible, it is possible that they were shipped to another, less accessible location. Several of the horses in the fields still had auction tags attached. The pen operator’s white Dodge truck and stock trailer were parked in the driveway, but there was no activity during the time of the observation.
We can’t be sure that this improvement of conditions will be permanent or if this is just a temporary reaction to the public exposure. AA will therefore continue to monitor the location.