Someone kindly passed on a newspaper article to me that let me know what happened with the charges Tammy Thompson faced for causing animals to be in distress. The article from the Mountain View Gazette on June 28th stated Ms. Thompson pleaded guilty and was fined $1000 and prohibited from owning more than 10 horses during the next five years.
To some that may seem like a solution, but in reality it is little more than a speeding ticket on the road to more disaster. The sad fact is “owning” horses just means they can't be directly owned by her. There is nothing stopping her from transferring ownership of the horses to a family or friend, but still keeping the horses. At the time of her assault charges she disappeared with close to 30 horses which means now there are at least 20 in limbo somewhere. Nor does this judgement prevent her from taking in other horses into her care.
What the newspaper article doesn't reveal is that, despite the financial problems which she admitted to in court, she continued to add horses to her herd and refused to sell or get rid of any despite the obvious problems for both her family and the horses.
I know that are court system is overloaded and they try in most cases to come up with an appropriate solution, but I believe in animal cases such as this I believe there should at minimum, be counselling programs involved in the sentence and specific monitoring procedures in place to ensure the problem is not reoccurring. Tammy Thompson got charged with assaulting her spouse and they sent her to counselling and anger management programs as part of her sentence. Why could they not do the same thing for her problem with animals?
Sadly Ms. Thompson's case is not the only case like this. All to often we are seeing people back in courts on charges because they have repeated the same behaviour that put their animals in distress the first time. We, as a society, need to come up with a better solution to dealing with these animal hoarding and abuse problems and encourage our politicians and courts to put these solutions in place for the benefit of the animals and the people involved.
If Tammy Thompson is selling horses that have a brand you co-own than without your authorization they are fraudulent sales and should be prosecuted by the authorities as such (not to mention the theft of your portion of the value in those animals). If she has changed the brand on the animals without your authorization then she is falsely branding horses and should be charged as such (as she has been in the past). You allow this woman to continue to flaunt the laws which puts you at fault as well. Deal with it.
ReplyDeleteFurther to my last comment anyone who knows where that this woman is selling horses with the r and diamond brand has a moral obligation to report this fraud
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