Who has the responsibility for the humane care of horses? One would think that Haines Animal Rescue Kennel (HARK) would. They handle dogs and cats and do a good job for us. Don’t they do the same job for horses? No! They can legally do very little for horses and nothing past three weeks. At the end of three weeks, they turned the case over to borough police. Now they are stuck with it, so they turned it over to state police. They have no guidelines, so they turned it over to the borough because the case was in the borough. This case needs to be followed up for at least a year to make sure it does not happen again. Those animals have suffered enough.
To make sure that this does not occur again, let’s get after the Haines Borough and the Alaska State Legislature to give HARK authority to handle horses as well as dogs and cats. This letter is, in no way, a complaint about HARK, because they did everything they legally could, and sent their crew up here to clean out our stalls with three months’ accumulation of horse manure, and set up a feeding schedule designed by a professional vet.