Ok, I'm in a bit of a pickle of what to do. The owner of my old barn has let her horses and place really go down. My friend and her mom, who still is there and leases a horse explained how bad it was. The owner of the barn is feeding the horses as little as she can get away with. The horses are stifting threw the sand trying to look for pieces of hay. The horses are almost never groomed, and are left with open gashes for days because nobody is looking closely at them let alone taking them out. Her manure is also getting out of hand. She was called on by the health deparment by a neighbor a while back which promted her to get a dumpster for the manure. Said dumpsteer is now overflowing and she has started to spread it around in deep piles right outside the barn, which no horse is in bceause she's cheap. On top of it all, she has 2 pregant mares which are both starved to death and eating alot of sand. The heat isn't helping them at all either.
The horse my friend leases was once a proud horse worth about 30k is a shell of her former self, is now worth not even 5k. She fell that much in less than 5 months, from when she was at her last show.
Now here is the real problem, what should we do? We were thinking of calling the health department on the barn owner, but would the horses just be better off here? If the health department takes the horses, what happens to them and is it possible to buy them from the health department? Who should we call? Any help is greatly appreciated.
*By the way, we are in central Florida*
The horse my friend leases was once a proud horse worth about 30k is a shell of her former self, is now worth not even 5k. She fell that much in less than 5 months, from when she was at her last show.
Now here is the real problem, what should we do? We were thinking of calling the health department on the barn owner, but would the horses just be better off here? If the health department takes the horses, what happens to them and is it possible to buy them from the health department? Who should we call? Any help is greatly appreciated.
*By the way, we are in central Florida*