Horse Killed on Roads and Complaint about Surrey Police...

Pocket.Rocket

Pocket.Rocket

Active Member
Joined
9 November 2012
Messages
41
Visit site
This was posted in a facebook group I am in and as the lady wanted it shared I figured I'd paste it to here also as I know the H&H forum has a lot of reach. It beggars belief really. :(


https://www.facebook.com/groups/chitchatandtach/permalink/771310316212810/



PLEASE CAN ALL HORSE OWNERS READ, WHO KNOWS WHO ELSE IT HAS HAPPENED TO AND THEY WILL NEVER FIND THEIR HORSES!!Hi all, I have been treated disgustingly by Surrey Police, They have still not informed me if it was my horse hit by a car! I have a few questions for them but I don't seem to be getting any where! I do not accept "it was dark" as an excuse to not call or a vet or have him checked for a micro chip, instead they called the meat man and he was taken straight away. Also Hawkins Slaughter did not check for a micro chip and we were told they get so many horses they would not know if it was him!


1. Why was he not checked for a micro chip? Why was a vet not called? I was told if he was a dog or cat they would have put in a box and taken to the vets….why is my boy any different from a family pet?!
2. Who decided they had the right to send him to slaughter and who signed the forms?
3. "it was dark" is not a good enough reason to not try and find his home or owner. Out of curtsey why did no one visit surrounding fields the following morning?
4. When I reported him stolen why was I not told about the accident, when I ask about it I was told they don't know!
5. Why did the attending officer not check the surrounding fields to ensure other horses could not get out? A horse does just not appear on the A331! Being Surrey police officers they must know the area, if not a simple goggle map would show all surrounding fields.
6. When I reported him stolen why did no officer attend the scene? Please explain how my horse left his feed, hay net, field companion, pushed through a safe and secure fence, then walked in a straight line right into the road? Also did he have a head collar on? How can the police be certain it was an accident if they did not attend the scene? The fence was checked at 5pm and as already stated in my stolen report there was trainer prints, crow bar marks on the wood and the fencing is of a very high quality!
7. What is the point in the country paying hundreds of pounds for micro chips, if they are not even scanned? Firstly not by the police and then still not checked at the slaughter? How many other horses have been lost this way and their owners not informed?
8. Why did it take Surrey Police 2 days to call me back about my horse? I called twice to report him stolen and 3 times I called and begged them to find me information about the accident. I then received a phone call at 9.15pm last night just to say he was killed out right (he is now obviously a vet!) and they thought he had just been dumped!
9. How was the driver? were they hurt? Did he see any one trying to take him?!
10. Why was the vet, RSPCA, local stables not informed that a horse had been on the A331, it just seems to have been brushed under the carpet.


I never had the chance to say good bye or to have him cremated. I certainly would not have had him sent to a slaughter house. Then the agonising 2 days spent searching for him whilst they knew he was dead is not acceptable. They had no right to decide what happens with my horse and surely it is illegal to slaughter a horse with out checking for a micro chip if not why do we spend out on micro chips?!! Please share so I can get my answers!!!!
Click to expand...
 
I saw this, I think it's absolutely disgraceful. In the original post where they reported him as stolen it said that they'd hand reared him from an hour old.

The poor horse - and the poor woman. I hope she makes a complaint about this.
 
Horse killed in accident - police can't box it up & drive it in a police car to the vets like they would a dog, knacker man is only logical option.
Police deal with lots of stray horses - can't spend hours checking miles of fencing.
Who would pay for vet to attend & scan the horse - could have just been another abandoned horse.
Stolen report should have been matched with accident report though.
There should be an accident report for the lady to follow up with driver & possible insurance claim (although I appreciate that's unlikely to be much consolation)
 
I've just been reading about this on Facebook. It's absolutely horrific and chills me to the bone that this could happen to mine or my friends' horses, or to any of us. I also feel so sorry for all the people who currently have missing horses (eg: Spirit and TicTac who are all over FB), who will now be wondering if this might have happened to their horses, and that all their searching over months and months might have been in vain! Truly scary stuff!
 
Absolutely shocking behaviour i really hope that with help from her friends this woman takes this to the police complaints commission and goes the whole way with it. I am disgusted that they did nothing to try to find the owner, get a vet even just to scan for the chip to let her know what happened, but the fact there was no attempt to get her shows such a lack of compassion and understanding of horse owners it beggars belief
 
Very very sad and not good that it took them two days to link the incidents.

Just a small aside and possible a little comfort - with a dead animal of any kind the slaughterman will have had to have him cremated (all be it a joint one) as they have no idea what he may or may not have died from they can't use the remains for anything so he will have been cremated.

Microchips are useless as there are several different makes and vets typically only have 1 or 2 types of scanner so even if a vet had attended that's no guarantee the chip could have been read.

It's a sad sign of the times we live in that the police just wouldn't have had time to spend on this type of incident, walking fence lines or knocking door to door for an animal just will never happen.

My OH is police officer and I've just asked him what he would do if he found a dead horse - he'd call the knackerman - that's it, same as when he has escaped sheep that get run over etc. He does try and locate owners but principally to give them the knackermans bill. He's very animal friendly and would fully understand what any pet means to their owners but his hands are tied by the rules and requirements of his job.
 
The police may not have been able to take the horse to a vet as they might a dog (they have no duty to deal with cats) but the slaughterhouse should have scanned for a chip, so that the owner could be informed.
A friend who lives within W.Yorks answered her door to 2 police officers who were very sorry to tell her that her black and white cat had been run over in the next street. They drove her round the corner, she identified the rather squashed (sorry)cat, they put it into a binbag for her and drove her home. It was a bit awkward when she then had to say 'Oh that's my cat, sitting on my doorstep'. !!!!
If W.Yorks can do that for a cat, why on earth couldn't Surrey police do something to find the owner of a dead horse?
 
While I appreciate that the police probably don't have time to go wandering about checking miles of fencing, the fact that this horse had been reported stolen 2 days previously & Dixon of Dock Green still didn't make the connection is appalling. I am sorry to say I have very little time for the police, IME they are not interested unless you have a bald tyre or have committed a major crime such as driving 4mph over the speed limit. Anything involving a bit of effort is just ignored, sorry no offence meant to the lady whose OH is a police officer, but they seriously need to get their act together & I really hope the poor lady who lost her horse in such a dreadful way seeks recourse at the highest level, if it were me I would be engaging a barrister. Edited to add that she only discovered the horses fate when she herself rang the slaughterhouse, yet another failing down to laziness.
 
The police, sadly, like all the public sector services, are now target driven, I rather doubt they have a target for animals, so they will have little time or incentive to sort these out.
 
YorksG said:
The police, sadly, like all the public sector services, are now target driven, I rather doubt they have a target for animals, so they will have little time or incentive to sort these out.
Click to expand...

^^^^ this totally, I'm a nurse and as soon as I can leave the profession I will. Everything we do is tied up with red tape and at no point are we ever allowed to employ our common sense and unfortunately there are plenty of jobsworths who will hide behind this and use it as an excuse for poor performance. Despite the fact the police may have thought the horse had been abandoned and the other excuses given to justify their actions, quite frankly finding a dead horse on a road is NOT an everyday occurrence, horses are not cats and aren't let out by owners to roam free - I know the incidence of abandoned horses being found has increased, the fact still remains that most horses are owned by people who love them dearly and in all likelihood a foundling DOES have a worried owner and actually it is a big deal. This poor woman must be going through hell right now.
 
What a desperately sad situation, I really feel for the poor owner. Ultimately though I think W1bbler has summed up the situation quite well.

w1bbler said:
Horse killed in accident - police can't box it up & drive it in a police car to the vets like they would a dog, knacker man is only logical option.
Police deal with lots of stray horses - can't spend hours checking miles of fencing.
Who would pay for vet to attend & scan the horse - could have just been another abandoned horse.
Stolen report should have been matched with accident report though.
There should be an accident report for the lady to follow up with driver & possible insurance claim (although I appreciate that's unlikely to be much consolation)
Click to expand...

As an aside it is mildly scandalous that microchips are such a scam.
 
Deplorable treatment and so insensitive to the worried owners. I hope she gets redress to help deal with her grief.

Are police officers even aware of microchip use in horses to the same extent it is used on cats and dogs? I would imagine any roadside accident with an animal would require a vet to attend, wasn't there a recent case of complaint when the police called the nearest vet who refused to attend because they were a small animal vet, I thought that meant they were at least aware that they should call someone out.
 
Well I hope they don't try to stick her for the knackerman's bill, because it seems they haven't identified the horse. Disgusting behaviour!
 
I have twice had horses deliberately let out of their fields during the night, which have ended up on roads. In both cases they were reported to the police by several motorists, but when I was trying to find out where they were the following mornings it still took me the best part of an hour to convince the police that they had even received reports of loose horses in the area.

You would think with everything being on computer these days it should be easier to to put 2 and 2 together, but apparently not.
 
Firstly my heart goes out to the owner of this horse, she truly has had a terrible ordeal. I sincerely hope she does take this matter further, and no, it won't bring the horse back but it may help her through the grieving process. From the OP it would seem that some offence had been committed in that the horse had been taken rather than broke out? Surely this needs investigation, what happens if the perpetrators come back? The other thing, of many, that concerns me is that assuming this was a local horse, with a local vet practice then they surely would have been able to get a positive ID/scan result for this animal. And as others have said, it should not have taken two day's to put two and two together. Me thinks some human empathy would not have gone amiss.
 
Stolen and accident report won't necessarily match if they happen on two different shifts unless someone with a clue looks at the log and cares enough to put two and two together. Horribly sad :(
 
I live very locally to this incident and am surprised at the police response. We've had need to contact the police recently and they have been very responsive. There have been a lot of incidents of horses loose on the roads around here in the last few weeks and the local PCSO called round to let me know. I know of at least 6 separate incidents. Stable doors have also been stolen from a couple of yards and again I have been warned about this by the police. There is a large traveller community close by and there are many horses tethered or found loose so the police may well have assumed it was one of those although the lady in question had spread the word very rapidly that the horse had been stolen and was seen loaded into a lorry on the A331. If it had been found there then they really should have linked the two.

I hope she gets to the bottom of it and after our experience of the local Surrey police hopefully they will be as helpful to her as they were with our issues and other horse related incidents locally.
 
The problem with Micro-chipping is that there are at least 7 different systems available in Great Britain and the scanner from one system may not detect the microchip of other systems. In addition it is not compulsory for vets to register a microchip with the manufacturers data base and not all manufacturers even bother to have a data base for the micro-chips they have sold. This means it is impossible for the emergency services to determine who the owner of a horse is as there is not a single up-dated data base that they can contact. Freezemarking is far more effective as a freezemark can be read by anyone. Best place is to freezemark the horse on it's shoulder as it can be seen when the horse is ridden. Until we get a central equine data base which holds the details of every horse in the u.k. including micro-chipping numbers and freemarks and owners keep their horses details updated we have a very real problem. This is why it is important to have a central European equine data base so that in an emergency situation it is possible to identify the contact details of the owner of the horse. Clearly there will be a financial implication to this as the data base has to be financially supported as this the policing of it but in emergency situations it will at least be possible to quickly identify the owner of the horse.
 
millikins said:
I find it very surprising that insurance companies don't insist on an attempt to prove ownership.
Click to expand...

This is actually a very good point, but perhaps it was too late by then. The police have to clear the road as quickly as possible, what were they supposed to do - leave the poor thing by the side of the road (can you imagine the thread about that !!) It isn't the police's job to help the insurance company.

In the fullness of time I'm sure the insurance company will track down the owner -any sensible owner (as this was) would report the horse missing to the police, any non sensible owner probably wouldn't have third party insurance anyway!!
 
This is very sad, I think they could have put the horse in a vacant field on till the next day. This would have given the owner a chance to find him.
 
^^^^ Just HOW do you expect this to have been done? ^^^^

The police cannot just dump dead animals on someone's land.

They could not physically lift or drag a horse out of the road.

If a knackerman is called out to remove it, he will remove it back to his yard, not come out once to shift it, and then again to remove it.
 
I hope they take more care with cattle/sheep, recording tag numbers ect. Thankfully we haven't had any run over, or prehaps we have with the sheep and don't know? Some will disappear when you have 100s and it happens, but I have seen escaped cattle before and they seem so ready to shoot them (after running after them and turning the sirens and beacons on them) and if you didn't find out what happened to them you could get so much grief from multiple organisations.

Having spoken to some people it seems police often don't know who they should be calling for escaped stock or horses and it's just luck if one of them knows they can phone the local hunt ect. They don't know what organisations or databases they should be contacting. I guess you can't blame them on the ground when they don't seem to have a set protocol dictated from above and if you have never grown up with horses or stock you would naturally be clueless. I needs a multi agency/disciplinary approach. Surely of benefit to them to as more chance of recovering costs?
Argument for freeze branding/ tags or etched phone numbers on rugs/head-collars?
 
Last edited:
As an owner we are liable for our animals even if they have been let loose so although this is a rubbish situation it seems unlikely you will be held responsible for any damage. I'm not sure what the police were expected to do, there is a dead animal on the road, getting the vet out isn't going to change the fact it is dead. Leaving it on the road is not an option and I'm not sure how else they could have moved it. I agree there is miscommunication between who the theft was reported to and the attending officers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top