Animal control officer questions why magistrate moved sick horses after inquiries began

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette

JON RYAN

Friday, Dec. 18, 2009, 11:55 p.m. - The animal control officer who Magistrate Jerry Hahn said didn't handle appropriately an investigation into Hahn's alleged mistreatment of horses responded this afternoon in an interview segment broadcast by WBRT AM 1320.

Jon Ryan, a former Nelson County deputy sheriff and an animal control officer for Nelson County, told WBRT he was only doing what he is supposed to do: Follow up on the complaints he received about the health of the horses on Hahn's Wilkerson Road farm. " That's what I'm supposed to do, and if I get a call tomorrow about it, I'll go back out there," he said.

Video and photographs posted on the Internet show emaciated and apparently ill horses crowded into a barn lot. In one of the photos, the aborted fetus of a foal is show laying in the mud. Horse rescue representatives who personally observed the horses on Hahn's farm said the mare who aborted the foal died soon afterward.

Hahn said the horses in question were sent to his farm by Buddy Ryan of Ryan Farms in Rineyville. Hahn said he found a total of 18 to 20 horses on his farm the morning after they were unloaded, and that his only goal was to nurse the horses back to health. He told WBRT he did not own the horses, and that he was only trying to save their lives He fed them old hay and distillery slop because in their malnourished state the animals' stomachs couldn't handle other feed.

Hahn said he moved the horses off his farm when he began to receive inquiries about his treatment of the animals. He said he moved the five thinnest horses from his Wilkerson Road farm to his farm on Plum Run Road and turned them out to pasture. He loaded up the rest of the animals and transported them to the Buck Ryan farm in Rineyville.

Jon Ryan told WBRT that after Hahn moved the horses back to Rineyville his investigation ended because he cannot cross county lines. And while Hahn was able to end Nelson County Animal Control's inquiry about the horses, moving them did not stop the widespread interest in the case.

"The last three or four days I've received calls from across the state from people wondering where those horses are because they want to save them," he said. "These national groups are quite upset."

All Ryan can do is to tell them the horses were moved out of the county, a move that Ryan questioned.

"I'm not too sure why those horses were sent to Rineyville so quickly if Mr. Hahn was just going to feed them and get them back in health," he said.

In an e-mail, Ryan told the Gazette, "If you ask Ryan horse farm, they say Mr. Hahn came and got the horses because they were so poor nobody wanted to buy them ... deep down those horses should have never been over in this county. They came from another county and should have stayed there."