It was almost a year ago when they came for Caroline O’Neill’s horses.
A number of the animals living on O’Neill’s Stafford County property were underweight, some had very advanced arthritis and another was living in “absolutely filthy” circumstances, equine rescuer Maya Proulx said.
“The condition of where they were at and how they were kept was just awful,” said another rescuer, Stacy Franklin.
Stafford Animal Control made the decision to seize the approximately 25 equines. The total made for one of the largest horse seizures in the county’s history, and a job for which an Animal Control sergeant and two rescue organizations were commended by the county’s Board of Supervisors in June.
O’Neill, however, doesn’t agree that her care of the horses was poor. But she said she had to plead no contest to animal cruelty because she was looking at potential felony convictions that would have meant the loss of her job, her home, and the dogs and cats that live inside there.
“I would have lost everything,” she said.
A complaint
The case began March 23, 2023, when the county received a complaint that 20 or so horses were being kept in subpar conditions at a home on Poplar Road, said Animal Control Sgt. Anthony McCall, who’s worked in the field since 2007.
The agency’s response to issues is education-based at first, McCall said. If the situation isn’t crazy, officers try to get residents to solve their own problems.
“Last thing we want to do is take a bunch of your horses,” he said.
In this case, another officer responded to the seven-acre farm first and discovered the situation was so dire that one horse had to be euthanized right away. A veterinarian also examined conditions and recommended steps that O’Neill could take to improve the horses’ lives and the property, which McCall said was in disarray: old used cars and trailers were sitting around, fencing was not adequate, feces littered the barn, and pasture management was poor.
There is no state law or county regulation stipulating how many horses someone can own, McCall said, but livestock veterinarians recommend two for the first acre of a tract and one for each additional acre. So the Poplar Road property should have been home to eight or nine equines — not 25.
O’Neill also was using outdated techniques in caring for the horses, McCall said, so Animal Control wanted her to employ more modern measures.
And the responding vet told O’Neill not to obtain more horses. But by August, an anonymous complaint came in that O’Neill had gotten two more. That’s when McCall got involved.
O’Neill was getting some of her horses from “kill pens,” which Tucson, Arizona-based Karuna Horse Rescue Inc. defines as holding horses in cramped and unhealthy conditions until they can be auctioned for slaughter.
That meant she was obtaining horses that were in poor shape to begin with, McCall said, and she thought she was doing the best she could with them.
But when authorities visited O’Neill’s property again, they discovered that nothing had changed. So McCall requested that another veterinary office inspect the site. That was Haymarket Veterinary Service, which dispatched a medical professional on Aug. 17.
The Haymarket vet said that not only had conditions on the farm not improved, they actually had grown worse. So McCall decided to act.
He contacted Proulx, executive director of Afton-based Hope’s Legacy Equine Rescue Inc., for help in finding the animals new homes. Later, he also talked to Franklin, executive director of Central Virginia Horse Rescue in Spotsylvania County.
“Now they’re the real heroes in this whole thing,” McCall said.
It was five minutes after 5 p.m. when he made the decision to seize.
“So things are closing,” he recalled. “It’s in the evening time. And she gets up there with seven trailers, Stacy does.”
Franklin was accompanied by several volunteers enlisted to transport the horses, who ended up at locations around the state.
One of them was pregnant and later gave birth. Other horses had various ailments. Each one had bad hooves.
“There wasn’t one horse that didn’t have a problem,” McCall said.
When describing the circumstances recently, he pointed at a photograph that he said was particularly telling.
“This is 3 1/2 feet,” he said, “of manure. And that’s where that horse lived.”
He also described a wall on the property as being covered with roaches.
The horse owner’s side
Those actually were beetles, O’Neill said, and the animal that had feces in his stall wasn’t being made to stay there. He could come and go as he pleased.
“All I had to go on were these recommendations that the vet made,” she said, “and some of them I agreed with because, you know, the place did look a mess. It wasn’t pretty or anything, but the fences were keeping the horses in. Nobody was escaping the property.”
One horse, which Franklin’s organization named “Coffee,” was deemed severely underweight when O’Neill’s animals were seized. He also had other problems.
His hooves were in bad shape, Franklin said, and his teeth were in a similar state.
He had scars and bite marks from where other horses had been biting him. His nose was sunburned, too, and cuts on his legs were infected.
His condition wasn’t good, though, the 63-year-old O’Neill said, because he had only recently come to Stafford from a kill pen.
“He’d gotten there 12 days before they took him,” she said.
The horses on her property cared for each other, O’Neill said. They had the option to go under the roof for shelter, if they chose, and they could have fresh, clean water and hay whenever they wanted.
“For livestock animals, they had everything that they needed to be happy and content,” O’Neill said. “And probably they had more, in addition, than most horses because they were a group, they were a family group.”
She also questioned the notion that she simply had too many horses, and that she was using outdated ways of looking after them.
In the end, however, she agreed to a plea deal that was finalized Dec. 29. She is not to own any more animals for the next seven years except for the two dogs and two cats she had in the house, and she has to cover $44,000 worth of vet bills: She must pay restitution of $24,000 to the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees Animal Control, and $20,000 to Hope’s Legacy.
Franklin said 25 horses is a large number of animals to be confiscated. Seizures more often involve only one to five equines.
She said she thinks O’Neill began with good intentions but didn’t know when to stop. A lot of people want to rescue horses but don’t have the knowledge or money required to do so.
The average cost to keep a horse is $700 per month per horse, Franklin said.
McCall said he hopes the ordeal is a turning point where O’Neill will realize that she went overboard.
“That’s all it was, is she overdid it,” he said. “If she had one or two horses, she’d probably be OK. But she overdid it, and she couldn’t stop. Even when we told her to stop, or bad things were going to happen.”
McCall also recommended that anyone touched by the O’Neill story donate to a horse rescue of their choosing.
And as for Coffee?
He’s now living comfortably with a family on the Northern Neck that takes him on trail rides.
