• Prized Horse Is Led Out of Stall and Butchered By Illegal Aliens in Flo

    From Democrat Strategy - Feed The Parasi@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 26 23:21:53 2015
    XPost: florida.politics, sac.politics, misc.immigration.usa
    XPost: alt.animals.horses.breeding

    Just before 7 a.m. Sunday, Deborah H. Stephens, a renowned
    American equestrian, arrived at her horse barn in Palmetto,
    Fla., to check on some paperwork and prepare for the day’s
    lessons.

    Suddenly, one of the barn workers appeared with unsettling news:
    The latch on the stall of a prized Grand Prix-level show jumper
    had been tampered with, and the horse was nowhere to be found.

    Within a half-hour, there were signs of an unusual crime, then a
    brutal discovery: The horse had been led from his stall and
    taken far from the barn, where he was carved up so
    professionally that authorities are investigating it as an
    animal cruelty case carried out by an expert butcher for meat.

    “He had been filleted,” the horse’s owner, Ms. Stephens, said in
    a telephone interview on Monday. “The slices were so deliberate
    and so well done that the moment you saw it: This was a
    professional.”

    The discovery of the horse, named Phedras de Blondel, in a
    remote pasture near the woods at Imperial Farms Equestrian
    Center posed a new element in a string of recent crimes that has
    involved the killing of stolen livestock for meat.

    Most of the incidents involved horses being stolen and then
    slaughtered in the southeast of the state, most recently in a
    slaughterhouse in Palm Beach County. In the more rural Manatee
    County, in Central Florida, there have been about one or two
    instances a year of cows being rustled and slaughtered, said
    David Bristow, a spokesman for the Manatee County sheriff’s
    department.

    But the killing of Phedras was the first time Mr. Bristow could
    recall that a horse had been butchered there, and the
    authorities are investigating whether there are links to the
    other cases, or new signs of an underground market in horse meat
    that is expanding.

    It is illegal to slaughter horses for meat in Florida, where
    parts of the state, especially in the north, are host to some of
    the equestrian sport’s top riders, breeders and events. Mr.
    Bristow said it was not clear whether the Imperial farm had been
    targeted. The sheriff’s incident report said the crime was also
    being treated as an occupied burglary and grand theft case.

    Ms. Stephens is an acclaimed Grand Prix show jumping competitor.
    In a career that has spanned decades, she is known for setting
    an outdoor high jump record of 7 feet 8 inches in 1983.

    She runs Centennial Equestrian Farm, one of several based at the
    Imperial horse complex, which is owned by her husband, Steve
    Stephens, a top show course designer and champion rider himself.

    Ms. Stephens said she had just recently purchased Phedras in
    Europe from a French breeder to ride for several years while she
    developed the skills of a younger horse who could then
    eventually take over as her primary mount in the Grand Prix,
    show jumping’s most prestigious and dramatic event.

    She had been planning to ride Phedras in their first Grand Prix
    competition in Wellington next month.

    The animal, a 12-year-old chestnut gelding, had just arrived at
    the farm in Florida on Friday, fresh from a proven track record
    of being a dependable competitor in Europe.

    At Imperial, he was not the tallest of the 36 horses boarded
    there. But of the tall horses, he was the fattest: weighing up
    to 1,500 pounds, she said. Authorities think that is why he was
    chosen for butchery by the suspects.

    That morning, the worker had peered into Phedras’s stall to give
    him grain. The latch was bolted into the door but unchained:
    Someone had neglected a crucial step of a two-step method that
    was the barn rule when closing stall doors.

    “Your new horse is missing,” Ms. Stephens said she was told. “I
    said, O.K.”

    Ms. Stephens, who said she was not a “panicker,” set off on foot
    to look for Phedras around the farm, which is more than 31 acres
    of rambling paddocks, training rings and pastures that contain
    another dozen horses. Sixteen people live on the compound,
    including grooms, stable hands and members of families that keep
    horses there.

    As her assistant and others looked around on foot, Ms. Stephens
    then decided to drive to the road, thinking Phedras might have
    run off. As she drove, she noticed a broken fence in a remote
    paddock. She told her assistant to take a look, and then Ms.
    Stephens heard screams.

    “She said he was dead,” Ms. Stephens said.

    Phedras’s carcass was found lying partially against the fence
    and ground. The head and neck were intact, but the legs were
    gone from the shoulders and cuts in the torso were smooth and
    deliberate.

    “They literally filleted his shoulders,” she said.

    The police arrived. Surveillance cameras were scrutinized, but
    yielded no clues, she said. A length of yellow nylon rope was
    discarded, believed to have been used as a makeshift halter to
    lead Phedras from the stall. A set of footprints — and
    hoofprints — could be traced through bushes and a field, in what
    appears to be the track of at least one suspect, she said.

    Ms. Stephens said there was a blood spatter located on what
    would have been the way to the final place where Phedras was
    slaughtered. A necropsy showed that a knife was plunged into the
    horse’s right ribs, puncturing the aorta, and officials think
    there was a struggle before the horse fatally weakened.

    “They knew where to put the knife,” Ms. Stephens said.

    A statement from the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office said the
    incident was believed to have happened between 8 p.m. Saturday
    and 7 a.m. Sunday.

    Ms. Stephens said she had found Phedras through an agent. She
    had ridden him for the first time in France before bringing him
    to the United States. She declined to disclose the amount that
    she had paid for him, but said he was not insured.

    “When I tried him it was a click,” she said. “We just had to
    become a team; he was everything I was looking for.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/sports/prized-horse-is-led-out- of-stall-and-butchered-in-florida.html

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)