Editor’s note: This is part two of a three-part series chronicling a 2020 local animal cruelty incident. Public records were used to reconstruct scenes from the case.
CENTRALIA — In January 2019, Lewis County Humane Officer Alishia Hornburg stepped onto a Winlock property to check up on a herd of bony horses locals had called in. There, she described the owner, Kelly Walker — who would later be charged with felony animal cruelty — as “very defensive.”
“Ms. Walker stated she didn’t think her horses required a barn or stalls to be kept properly.”
Horses are given a body condition score between one and nine, one being emaciated with no body fat and nine being obese.
On Horburg’s visit, she described at least one as “emaciated,” and scored two horses at 1.5. One large black gelding was missing his right eye, replaced by an oozing infection.
Two horses lived in “filthy” stalls “with no clean, dry place to stand or lie down,” a violation of state law. Hornburg could see that, living in a herd dynamic, some horses were being denied limited food by stronger, more dominant horses.
After reading Hornburg’s written report, Jonni Cournyer — who would foster one of the surviving horses — said she was sick to her stomach.
It would take officials another year to confiscate the herd. When they did, two horses were already dead, and another two would quickly have to be euthanized. Cournyer said she suspects more carcasses are scattered across the 30-acre property.
“You had everything right then and there to take those horses out of there,” Cournyer told The Chronicle. “But they sat there another year and suffered.”
It’s true. According to Bill Teitzel, a county public health supervisor, the county “likely could have acted solely on what (Hornburg) was seeing there.”
But with neglect cases, the goal is to educate the owner, Teitzel said. It’s the same strategy local code enforcement personnel take with residents across the county. And in some ways, it’s a judgement call.
Horburg instructed the owner to take two suffering horses — the one with a missing eye and oozing infection, and the “emaciated” chestnut horse — to the vet.
“I explained that I will be driving by, and I don’t wish to see the horses hungry, gnawing on trees,” Hornburg wrote.
While Horburg said she’d be following up in a few weeks, the owner proved uncooperative. Throughout the course of the county’s dealings with Walker, officials say she ignored five notices left on her property.
Eight months later, Hornburg had repeatedly tried to access the property to evaluate the horses, to no avail.
“Myself and Lewis County Sheriff’s Office continue to receive complaints regarding the horses and their conditions, lack of feed, lack of water and overall lack of consistent care,” she wrote.
With an uncooperative owner and neglected animals, Teitzel said the goal became obtaining a warrant and pursuing felony charges, which would restrict Walker from owning animals in the state.
But with no legal ability to get onto the property, collecting evidence took time, he said. And in some ways, officials don’t want to make perpetrators aware that they’re being watched.
“Because guess what happens? Those animals disappear,” said Dr. Michael Clark, an equine veterinarian who works with Lewis and Thurston counties.
Clark reckons that the case, while tragic, isn’t an outlier — especially in a rural place like Lewis County, where wooded areas and private roads can easily keep suffering animals out of sight.
Perhaps one way the Winlock case was an outlier, then, is that the property was highly visible to drivers.
Beverly Ritter was one neighbor who raised concern over the animals back in 2018, before moving out of the state.
“As time went on the horses began to show signs of malnutrition and were always in mud because they had eaten all the grass. I never saw any hay for them in the fields,” she wrote Cournyer this January. “I do not understand why these horses had to suffer for so long before anything was done for them.”
The results of Walker’s abuse were tragic. But Teitzel says the case was a success in some ways. It resulted in a felony conviction, meaning Walker was barred from acquiring more horses in the state. And while two horses had to be euthanized, the bone marrow analysis that came from their bodies was likely a “critical” piece of evidence to convict Walker, he said.
According to Clark, that analysis showed a less than 1% body fat content — shockingly lower than a normal 86%. The horses were so starved, he said, that they likely wouldn’t have survived, even if the county confiscated them earlier.
“There isn’t enough time in the world to put enough energy back into the horses for them to live,” he said.
Did the two horse’s deaths, in some ways, help prevent Walker from putting animals through the same cruelty in the future?
“In some way, that’s my opinion, yeah. I do believe that,” Teitzel told The Chronicle.
Genóa Dunn, who lives just six minutes away from where the abuse occurred, and has since adopted one of the horses, said she doesn’t buy it.
“It doesn’t take a horse dead to help animals,” she said last week. “I think there needs to be some reform.”
