‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ asked the lady as she sat beside me in the caravan. The old farmer, a horse dealer, sat on another seat looking stunned.
‘You look exhausted,’ she said. I was. I’d driven hundreds of miles looking for horses I had seen seized from the horse dealer’s farm. But I didn’t want to worry her by telling her where I thought I had found them.
I had set off in pursuit of a fleet of lorries marked with the address of a Yorkshire company, after 123 horses were seized by the RSPCA and the police in a joint operation with Trading Standards, from Hurst Farm, just down the road from my house in Surrey. Although the place was always a mess, I felt uneasy. Having driven by every day and always seen the horses eating from plentiful bales of haylage in winter, or grazing 100 acres of grass in summer, I was doubtful that these horses needed rescuing.
The RSPCA told local people not to worry about the horses — they were going to nearby shelters. But the lorries had come down from Yorkshire, so the journey had to be a long one or it didn’t make any sense.
My bitter experience of investigating past horse seizures made me get in my car and set out to find them. I drove and drove, until finally I think I found some of the horses in a barn on a farm, somewhere remote.
As I was looking, independent vets charged with visiting seized horses were engaged in an 800-mile round trip to view them all and verify their condition. They found that they had been transported almost to the four corners of the country, from south to north, Wales to East Anglia.
Meanwhile, the RSPCA admitted publicly that seven horses had already been PTS (put to sleep) — two on site during the raid, and five more in RSPCA care.
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