Abandoned, nearly-starved horse finds a new home

LEBANON, Va. – White Mullins took one look at the skinny, old horse – found abandoned and nearly starved to death – and reckoned he’d better not take her home.

“Well, then she laid her head on my chest, just like this,” he said, rubbing her jagged jawbone. “I thought if she lives two months, that’d be two months she didn’t have. I’m three days older than dirt; me and her both. Just ’cause we’re getting old, don’t put us out.”

So Mullins packed her up and took her home. He named her Maude.

A farmer found her a week or so earlier, grazing in his field off Beech Mountain Road in Damascus. She was 250 pounds underweight with joints and bones abrading through her skin. She couldn’t eat for bad teeth and, somewhere along the line, she got her legs caught up in barbed wire.

“Whoever owned this horse just put it off in someone else’s field,” said Washington County Animal Control Officer Jason Alexander.

It was a secluded area, nearly 200 acres with a county road passing through.

“It’s a convenient place to dump a horse,” he said. 

Lacking facilities to house a horse, animal control stored her at Tri-State Livestock Market in Abingdon. They thought they’d have to euthanize the old horse.

But someone thought of Mullins, a coal miner and animal lover who had five horses until a recent divorce.

“I guess I treat my horses better than I treat my women,” Mullins said. “Humans can take care of themselves. But animals – they need our help.”

Now Maude, estimated at around 30 years old, lives in a four-acre field next to his house on Gay Street in Lebanon. A veterinarian fixed her teeth – but, at first, she moped next to the gate with her head down. Mullins thought she was a goner. “I was afraid she was gonna die,” said neighbor Peggy Hughes, who checks on Maude every day. “And I didn’t want to watch a horse die. It’s just too sad.”

But Maude started eating. She perked up, then roamed around his sloped hillside and came back covered in burs. She put on 30 pounds.

“I call her Maudie, Baby, Lady – she don’t care what you call her as long as you call her with a feed bucket,” Mullins said, watching Maude munch on apples a neighbor brought by. “Ohhhh, is that good, baby? Yummy, yummy, yummy.”

“This one ended well, I’m glad to say,” Alexander said. “But I’m afraid we’re going to see more in the future.”

Though Maude is the first horse found abandoned in Washington County, Alexander attributes his fear to anti-horse slaughter legislation.

In 2007, the last three horse slaughterhouses in the United States, two in Texas and one in Illinois, all run by European companies, shut down.

But American horses are still shipped, by “killer buyers” at livestock auctions, to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada, according to the Humane Society of the United States. Federal legislation is pending that would outlaw sending any American horse to slaughter.

A common belief, Alexander said, is that people who would have sold their old and useless horses to slaughterhouses now can’t get rid of them. So they drop them off somewhere or simply let them starve to death.

The Animal Welfare Institute estimates that it costs about $600 a month to care for a horse. In rural areas with plenty of grass, that figure can be as low as $250 a month.

According to the Humane Society and the Animal Welfare Institute, which both support the federal law to ban horse slaughter, 100,000 American horses are now slaughtered in foreign factories, which is the same number slaughtered in American factories before they shut down.

Horse meat is a delicacy in some European countries like France and Belgium. American horses are especially coveted, listed on menus as “American mustang” and “American champion,” according to Chris Heyde, deputy director of the Animal Welfare Institute.

“The idea that the effort to ban horse slaughter in the United States increases abuse and abandonment is not coming from horse owners, it’s coming from the slaughter industry,” Heyde said. “It hasn’t even been banned yet and they act like the sky is falling. It’s nonsense. Horses have always been abandoned. And everybody looks for excuses for why the poor individual did this, so they spin it around and blame it on other things. If you have an animal, you have a responsibility to care for them. I can’t own a horse because I can’t afford a horse.”

The American Association of Equine Practitioners, a professional group of veterinarians, opposes the passage of anti-slaughter laws. Spokeswoman Sally J. Baker said that in 2008, as the economy crashed and slaughterhouses closed, the number of unwanted horses shot up.

“We have opposed that bill not because we are pro-slaughter, but given the large population of unwanted horses and few viable solutions for them, we feel that slaughter at the moment is an option that should be considered,” Baker said. “We do not feel that is the best option.”

There is no central database to track those numbers, she said, and their position is based on anecdotal evidence from newspapers and their members.

Mullins said he doesn’t care much about the politics of why someone left Maude to starve.

“If I owned her and put her in this kind of shape, I wouldn’t admit to owning her either,” he said. “That’s jail time. And it should be. I just got a very low opinion of somebody who’d do this – there’s just no explanation for it.”

Alexander has a list of charges he’d like to place against the person who left her. But Mullins doesn’t care one way or another, he said. He’s just glad to have a new friend:

“If you was able, you’d be a riding horse, wouldn’t you?” he asked Maude. “Maybe one day she’ll get to where she can ride the grandkids around.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531