Horse neglect
Otisville, NY (US)Incident Date: Friday, Sep 30, 2005
County: Orange
Disposition: Civil Case
Person of Interest: Ernest Green
Retired NYPD horses who have been spending their golden years at a troubled upstate Otisville farm are heading to greener pastures.
The city this week settled a lawsuit against an Orange County farm that has housed elderly police horses since 1983, ensuring the 27 animals will soon be transferred to better stables for their final days.
"This settlement permits the city and the NYPD to ensure the level of care that the retired horses deserve," said John Low-Beer, senior counsel, city's Law Department.
The city sued the farm's owner, Ernest Green, last year after local residents complained that the horses were going hungry. That led to a surprise visit from an NYPD vet, who found that eight of the 58 horses on the 115-acre spread at the time were "grossly underweight."
"We got beat up pretty bad, got called all types of names," Green said yesterday. "But we just ran into a problem where we didn't have the money to operate the facility and feed all these horses."
Green's biotech company, Breonics Inc., had purchased the farm in 2001 and agreed to continue to care for the horses for as long as the city had a mounted police unit. But when the company's financial fortunes plummeted, the horses' care suffered.
"We spent more than $100,000 of our own money trying to keep these animals fed," said Green, who denied allegations of animal abuse.
Under the settlement, Breonics must sell a portion of the property by late 2008 and pay $175,000 to the city, which hopes to relocate the horses to farms in New York and New Hampshire. The city will pay for their care.
Green said he had hoped the horses could stay in Otisville, but said the city didn't seem interested in buying his farm for $1 or contributing to a nonprofit created to fund the horses' care.
"I didn't want to see it come to this," he said. References« NY State Animal Cruelty Map
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