Police shoot horse shot on highway near Hibbing
December 24, 2012 at 6:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
A wayward horse that refused to be corralled or to move off busy Minnesota Highway 73 south of Hibbing was shot Sunday afternoon by a state trooper.
Continue Reading
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
33 
50
A wonderful young man I went to school with was killed when his car hit a horse which was loose and wandering on a highway. Decades later, his parents were still devastated. If the horse wouldn’t move there really weren’t many alternatives and life isn’t nearly as simple as it is on TV…
Like or Dislike:
10 
4
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Like or Dislike:
28 
47
I see the nutjob contingent has arrived.
First, you two are assuming this guy just showed up & started blasting.
Second, tranquilizing a horse isn’t exactly an easy task when it’s confused and in traffic. Also, how many vets in the Hibbing area are even able to do it? I know folks up that way who take their horses to Stillwater for vet care. If there’s no large-animal vet remotely close to Hibbing, you’re talking about a several-hour wait.
The world isn’t perfect. It’s not a static little thing you can just rearrange options so that they fit your little viewpoint of how things should be. You have a very large, confused, and potentially dangerous animal in the middle of a highway? Yes, the trooper made the right call. And if it dropped in the middle of the road? That’s why hopefully the trooper had the foresight to call for a wrecker to drag it off the road.
But let me guess, both you chuckles got a ticket from a trooper once, so now you hate all law enforcement? DUI? No seat belt?
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
55 
26
It sure is easy to throw rocks at this trooper without the information of what actually happened on scene. I say cut the trooper a little slack. He or she had to make a lot of damn tough decisions rather quickly, and believe it or not, real life is quite a bit different than cable television where a squadron of air cavalry vets with tranquilizer guns is always ready at a moments notice.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
45 
19
As someone who works in the veterinary community, and who has a bit of basic sense, I can’t help but wonder why a horse…who is a prey animal…who was skinny….would just stand there when a predator (a human) approached it. Odds are it was either about to starve to death and didn’t have the strength to run off, or perhaps it had already been hit by a car or had some other trauma that caused it to not act like it should have.
Did the trooper make the right choice? Since he’d been trying for 2 hours to get the beast off the road…with no equine veterinarian in the area…risking not only the horses life but his own by being in the road for that long, I’d say at that point he did what he could.
The bigger question that I have is why was this horse in the road to begin with? Clearly someone in Hibbing had been missing a horse for quite some time taking into account the condition the animal was in…maybe we should focus more on finding out who owned this animal and why it wasn’t propertly fed and/or contained and less on the poor guy who got stuck dealing with someone else’s mess.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
64 
4
If you have ever seen an accident where a cow, horse, moose has been hit by a vehicle you would be glad the trooper protected public safety. He probably saved lives by doing what he did.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
31 
9
Ban livestock on the road.
Like or Dislike:
13 
6
Cut the trooper a little slack. They’d been trying to get the horse off the road for two hours with no success. A horse is way bigger than a deer, more like a moose. They can do a lot of damage to a car and kill occupants. If all the flashing lights, sirens, and commotion couldn’t scare it off the road, the only solution was to put it down before someone got hurt.
Don’t blame the trooper, blame the owner who let the animal loose in the first place. Horses belong to someone.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
22 
5
Whatever we all think, it’s purely speculation. My first comment was shot down in flames. Fine because I succinctly stated my view which was admittedly oversimplification. I grant you that. But time and again, the police (everywhere in the country) shoots wayward animals – zoo escapees, scared wayward wild animals that wander into town, etc.
That is not a humane or civilized way to deal with these things. It ought to be a last resort or self defense.
The state trooper – I don’t know. I imagine back-up and support were hard to find. Who really knows?
So, if you want to cut him/her slack. Fine.
Where is the police protocol for such incidents? There probably isn’t one and I’m quite sure a lot of cops have no training for dealing with animals (pets, livestock, zoo or wild) and many don’t even like animals. Who can say about this situation.
I know a thing or two about equines. A bucket of food or bringing another horse to the scene would have removed that terrified and confused horse off that road.
A proper protocol something like – shut down the road, call an equine contact person for the area, they would mobilise and deploy what’s needed (horse in a trailer, food, handler, etc) and get there pronto.
Done.
Like or Dislike:
4 
10
This reminds me of when we went to Mount Rushmore. On the way to Keystone a herd of bison blocked the rode. We couldn’t move for over an hour. As we waited the largest of the herd glared at us from the front of our vehicle. Finally he took a few steps and rest of the herd moved out of our way. Total attitude is what we encountered. I swear that giant beast did it on purpose.
Like or Dislike:
3 
3