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Recovery of Stolen Equines
Subject Index § Introduction § Overview § Branding § Marking & Other ID § Non-visible ID
§ Recovery § Slaughter House Addresses §
Subject: Horse Theft Prevention #6 Several people have requested permission to print this series of articles in their local horse club newsletters or registry journals. Anyone wishing to do so is free to share these articles with anyone they want, and in any format. You may copy them, word for word if you want; you may edit them but not change the meaning of the content; you may forward them to another list, or download them onto a disk to share with a computer compatible friend. The important thing here is to get the word out so people can make decisions and take steps to protect themselves and their horses. This article covers what to do if your horse has been stolen. Prevention is the first line of defense in protecting your horse, and some or all of the steps covered in previous articles should have been taken (visible ID, pictures, current descriptions, up-to-date files, etc.). But, if your horse is stolen, finding him or her depends on how fast you act and who you contact. 1. Contact neighbors, local police, state police, sheriff, county sheriff's livestock deputy, county brand inspector. Know which of the local agencies has jurisdiction in your area - if you live outside the city limits do you contact the police or sheriff? Knowing who to contact the first time will save time. By the way, here is where a freezemark on a horse can help. Since the freezemark is individual to each horse, the information can be entered into a "stolen" database at the National Crime Information Center, and the information can be shared nationwide (U.S.). Other forms of visible ID cannot be listed this way because they are not individual to each individual horse. 2. Contact USDA licensed equine slaughter houses in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico if you're in North America (Article 7 will include info on these). If there is a slaughterhouse you or your friends can get to, be there when it opens in the morning. Alert all slaughterhouses and auction yards within a 500-1,000 mile radius that your horse has been stolen. FAX your fliers to them. Do NOT include your home address or stable address on the flier. List a phone number, the number of the law enforcement agency and/or a P.O. Box. If you offer a reward be sure to preface it with "safe return of horses and leading to the arrest and conviction of person or persons responsible for theft." 3. Make copies of your flier to distribute to farriers, vets, horse-related stores, feed stores, trailer sales, etc. Contact other agencies which might be of help - Bureau of Livestock ID (your state's capital or County Seat), cattlemen's association, sheriff's posse, Department of Transportation. 4. Contact slaughterhouses and auction yards daily. If it's too far away from you, make a personal call to the manager. Ask him or her to post your flier near the weigh station (each horse is weighed individually). Remind him or her of your theft problem. 5. Organize a group of family and friends to spread fliers, visit slaughterhouses, etc. 6. If your property did not previously have security of some kind, do it now. If you have any horses left, you could be targeted again, especially if the thieves think of your place as an "easy mark". 7. Saturate your area with your fliers - bus stops, grocery stores, highway rest stops - any place you can think of where people might see it. 8. Contact your breed registry to let them know your horse is missing and you want a red flag placed on the papers so no one can sell the horse and then ask for a transfer of title (some registries charge a fee for this). How could the thief get enough information to try to transfer title? Remember my mentioning boarding stables where all sorts of information about the horse and owner is posted on the stall door? That's where thieves could get the information. They may also have the legal papers for an animal who has died, but want to find an animal that meets with the same description - so they go "shopping". 9. Call the media - local radio stations often allow public service messages; television stations, newspapers, your horse club newsletter, your breed registry journal or newsletter, etc. Contact statewide horse clubs and organizations and mail your flier to them. Leave stacks of fliers at the local law enforcement agency desks. Post to listservs. 10. When visiting auction yards and slaughterhouses look in every horse trailer and in all holding pens. Make sure you check the "out-the-door" parking lot. Often "hot" horses show up at auctions just seconds before the sales begin, with ficticious papers being flashed at officials who wave violators through. 11. Stay in touch with law enforcement officials. Check to see if fliers have been posted and remain posted at local sites. 12. Don't give up. Recovering stolen horses takes time. I recently heard of one man whose horse was stolen from a rodeo. He spotted the horse at another rodeo seven (yes, seven!) years later and recovered him. Be aware that the recovery rate is very low unless you have had your horse visibly marked. 13. If you locate your horse, keep him or her under surveillance, staying as far away as possible. Call law enforcement and let them handle the recovery. Again, I have another story about a person someone told me about whose horse was stolen in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Valley area of California. The owner discovered the horse about a year later in a pasture somewhere and contacted the local police. They went out to the pasture, the owner carrying pictures of the horse taken before the theft, yet the officer, who was inexperienced with livestock, could not recognize the horse he saw as the horse in the picture because the horse had lost weight and had not been kept up or groomed as it had when the pictures were taken. The officer claimed that the horse he was looking at was not the horse in the picture, and the owner was not allowed to take her horse back. Now, if this horse had had some kind of visible mark this situation would have probably never happened. As you might tell, I'm a big advocate of visibly marking horses. 14. If law enforcement officials catch your thief, make sure you prosecute. If you live in a state where horses are considered livestock, the offenders can face felony charges as opposed to a misdemeanor with a pitifully small fine ($500) and no imprisonment. I sincerely hope you never have to suffer through this, but if you are prepared you can swing into action and start the recovery process immediately. I'd now like to share something with you here that I wasn't going to share at all, only because I wanted these articles to be as dispassionate and factual as possible, but with the recent interest on this list about freezemarking, I thought I'd jump in. About three years ago, after the theft of some horses not too far from me I had the need to make a quick decision about how I wanted to protect my horses. That anyone would steal a horse in this day and age was as foreign to me as anything I could conjure up on my own. I looked into hot branding, tattooing, microchipping, and freezemarking. Eventually after lots of questions and reading, I made a decision based on a "gut feeling". I had my horses freezemarked (the line of symbols on the neck). Now, after doing all sorts of research and discussing this issue with lots of people, and knowing what I know now, I can tell you with absolute assuredness, that if I had to do it over again, I would still choose freezemarking. It's painless, individual to each horse, can be translated into codes for the NCIC (National Crime Information Center), and has a track record of recordkeeping both with the California Bureau of Livestock ID (my state) and Kryo Kinetics, and is a powerful deterrant. I even like the look of the marks, and they are great conversation openers. Everyone I encounter on trails asks about the marks on my horses and wants to know all about them; so I would encourage you, if you are considering a system of visible ID, to give a lot of weight to freezemarking. By the way, I am not an employee of Kryo Kinetics, nor do I reap any monetary benefits from endorsing them and their service. The next article in the series will give you names and addresses of helpful groups (equine issues and activists, etc.) as well as names and addresses of equine slaughterhouses primarily in the U.S. *********************************************************************** Theft Prevention #7 This article will list the names, addresses, and phone numbers of equine slaughter houses around the U.S.A., and will also provide information about helpful horse groups. I was going to include fax numbers, but I can't look at and type any more numbers! So if you want the fax numbers (very handy by the way) please call the places listed and ask the managers for them. If any of the information here is out-of-date, please make sure you update your records. Equine Slaughter Houses in the U.S.A. (*NOTE: This list is now updated.) Dallas Crown Packing Inc. 2000 West Fair P.O. Box 467 (mailing) Kaufman, TX 75142 214-932-3436 Cavel International, Inc. 108 Harvestore Dr. Dekalb, IL 60115 815-756-8123 Central Nebraska Pkg., Inc. 2800 E. Eighth St. North Platte, NE 69101 308-532-1250 Beltex Corp. 3801 N. Grove St. (or 3301?) Fort Worth, TX 76106 817-624-1136 .......................... NEXT, some helpful horse groups whose stated purposes include horse rescue, legislation, stopping cruelty, etc. Let us know if you know of others. Equestrial Trails, Inc. Equestrian Trails, Inc 13741 Foothill Blvd. #220 H.O.R.S.E. Corral 911 Sylmar, CA 91342 P.O. Box 927007 818-362-6819 San Diego, CA 92192-7007 619-459-2299 Dawn Narvaez American Horse Protection Assoc. Horse Theft Prevention 1000 29th St. NW, Suite T-100 P.O. Box 158 Washington, D.C. 20007 Rough and Ready, CA 95975 202-965-0500 916-268-1776 All Creatures Humane Society, Inc. American Horse Council 913 Dianne Drive 1700 K Street, N.W. #300 Turlock, CA 95380 Washington, D.C. 20006-3805 209-667-0700 202-296-4031 Hooved Animal Humane Society Horse Care P.O. Box 400 1295 Shaw Ave. #104-167 Woodstock, IL 60098 Clovis, CA 93612 815-337-5563 209-294-1632 Horse Power International Texas Horse Owners Assoc. P.O. Box 998 Horse Rescue and Crime Stoppers Carmel, CA 93921 P.O. Box 91109 408-624-7854 Houston, TX 77291-1109 713-247-8863 or 713-935-2181 The Hanging Tree Trail Riders of DuPage Coalition Against the Horse 300 E. Chicago Ave. Slaughter Trade Westmont, IL 60559 P.O. Box 907 708-887-8542 Penngrove, CA 94591 707-762-3644 Intn'l Equine Recovery Network Redwings Horse Sanctuary 131 E. Exchange Ave., Suite 116 P.O. Box 222705 Fort Worth, TX 76106 Carmel, CA 93922 800-842-8725 Ryerss Farm for Aged Equines Rt. 23, RD 2 Pottstown, PA 19464 Most states have a state horse council, so you might check with local horse clubs to see if anyone there has the specifics. There are also many local horse (and other animals) rescue groups which you might want to find out about. Many times these are one or two-person operations, yet they do a lot of good. For instance, the state of Florida has an emergency response team known as DART, which can come in and assist with animals who've been separated from their owners in such natural disasters as hurricanes, etc. This group got their start after one of the major hurricanes when through parts of Florida. Note: a quite extensive list of horse groups can be found in the October, 1996 edition of "Horse Health". *********************************************************************** Kathy Graves kgraves@sisnet.ssku.k12.ca.us ***********************************************************************
This article copyright 1996 Kathy Graves, except as noted.