It’s been over a week now since your horses have been led out of their snowy “would-be-grave”, and a couple of days ago they left to be in the care of the SPCA. I only spent a few hours with those two scruffy-looking critters, but I can’t help but feel a little sad about them being gone. They touched my heart, and the heart of everyone involved in their rescue.

 

My questions to you are: how can you claim that you did everything you possibly could, to save your horses from their terrible fate? How could you say “good-bye” to your horses, the ones you apparently raised from when they were foals, knowing that they would die of a slow, painful and horrible death of starvation? How can you be okay with “nature taking its course”, when naturally those horses would have never been up there at this time of year, if it wasn’t for you leading them there!

 

I don’t blame you for losing the horses, even though, with better preparation you would have never been on the wrong trail in the first place, and most likely would have never gotten stuck the way you did. You were on the wrong road going to the destination you were headed for, and a lot of local outfitters and horse-owners could have pointed you in the right direction. However, the back-country can be tough and horses take off sometimes. You left them up there in September. That left you with a lot of time to go and look for them. And there were a lot of ways to find them. You could have hired some more people, you could have hired an airplane, you could have contacted every horse-person in the valley (not just one) and you could have spent more time doing so. You say you are a lawyer and too busy for that. That is like saying that your time is more important than ours and that is arrogant! Those two horses were up on that mountain due to your ignorance. It should have been your intelligence that should have gotten them back out!

 

The last and most ignorant thing you did, and that I do blame you for, is to actually put in the time and effort to find the horses, and then turn your back on them, knowing how awfully they would have to die! You could have air-lifted the horses out. It was neither that cold then, ‘nor was there that much snow’. Or you could have opted to fly in some round bales of hay to them. The helicopter outfits we contacted were all very willing to help. Did you ever call them? Instead you left the poor creatures with their last meal of grain and Gatorade!? What’s that all about! Don’t you know that sugar is the last thing that a starving animal should have? They could have died of colic right there and then, and that would have been just as painful of a death! And then you walked away!

 

Again, you could have contacted us local horse-owners for help. We would not have wanted your money. We still don’t want your money, but we do not want to be treated like idiots either, and that’s clearly what you were thinking of us, when you asked how the rescue efforts are going and when you could expect the horses to be available to you for pick-up!

 

If you would have called us to find out how you could have helped, that would have been a different story. We could have used some of those people that you hired before, to take us up there on sleds, because it turns out that horse-people aren’t necessarily snowmobilers and vice-versa. So we had people willing to shovel that didn’t have a ride in, and we had people with sleds that didn’t want to shovel.

 

You could have spent your days in the Renshaw parking lot, asking sledders to lend a hand with your horses. I did one day, because I didn’t have a ride. So I did whatever else I could. That could have been you. Sandwiches, warm drinks and encouraging words at the end of the cold day of shoveling would also have been appreciated, but you were too busy!

 

It’s only a little short of a miracle that our rescue efforts were successful, because the weather in the mountains is so unpredictable, and even though it was awfully cold at times, the whole operation must have been under a lucky star, because it never snowed once during that whole week. That’s quite unusual this time of year on this side of the Rockies.

 

In the end we got ‘em out and we are happy! What we need now is your assurance that you will never put an animal through such an ordeal again! As for Sundance and Belle, you wrote them off when you turned your back on them! Don’t waste our taxpayer’s money on a trial, trying to get them back, after you wasted all of our time and effort to clean up your mess. Admit that you have made a huge mistake, and all the “could have’s” in my letter to you clearly show that you have not done everything you could have. So let it be and we can all go on with our lives, including Sundance and Belle, who can hopefully look forward to a life with an owner who cares!

 

 

December 31, 2008,

Monika Brown, McBride BC