Students and faculty at Olds College are struggling to understand why someone would deliberately free stallions from their pens and then standby and watch as the horses fought one another.
Staff and students at the agricultural college say someone tampered with the pens and let four stallions and two geldings out to battle for dominance.
The incident happened late Saturday or early Sunday morning.
Avery Thiessen is a second year student and when she arrived at the pens to care for the animals she found one stallion dead.
“I thought, who could ever think of this,” said Thiessen. “When I went to bring the horse that belonged to the pen, back to his pen and I found the horse I just took a closer look at him and found him dead, then a big shock and I didn’t really know what to do.”
The horse bled to death after being kicked repeatedly and a second horse was seriously injured but is expected to make a full recovery.
The incident has sickened and angered students and staff at the college.
“By the way the pens were deliberately closed. The way the effort was made to make sure that every single pen was open and remained, was secured open, indicated that somebody deliberately did these things, made this happen,” said Dr. Marion Anderson, Olds College Veterinarian. “They’re a demented person I guess, in thinking about it further though, probably someone felt that it would be an amusing incident to watch stallions fight.”
The college is offering $1000 reward in the case and Olds RCMP are investigating.
