What would possess someone to shoot and kill seventeen horses?
Seventeen feral horses were found shot to death on Friday close to Walhachin, B.C., an area in the province’s interior some 65 miles west of Kamloops. While relatively remote, the Trans-Canada Highway cuts through the region and there are several protected natural areas around. As well, there are a number of First Nation reserves close by, with one of them, the Skeetchestn Band, attaching significant cultural importance to the wild horses in the area.
I can’t fathom the motivation behind such a hateful act, no more than I can fathom somebody shooting up a school, or a church, or a mosque, or a shopping mall. It’s beyond justification.
Why wild horses? It’s not like these animals were all lined up along the guardrail on Highway 1 waiting for somebody to come along and shoot them. Whoever did it would have to go back-country, and have some familiarity with back-country, in order to do it. So right off the bat, I see someone who is semi-local to the area, someone who either lives there or visits there often-enough.
Again, why wild horses? It seems to me that a person would have to have an unbelievable rage against equines to rise to the level of mass murder. Maybe it was just a random attack, with horses conveniently happening along the path of the killer(s).
Shooting seventeen agile animals would be hard to do alone, so I suspect more than one perpetrator.
Would it be somebody who knows of the cultural importance of the horse to the nearby Skeetchestn Band? If so, does that rise to the level of hate crime?
Could it be a disaffected indigenous person, angry at the band for whatever reason, taking that anger out on something sacred and beautiful to that community?
Whoever is to blame for this abhorrent act is not somebody I’d like to see walking free. I wish for a speedy identification and arrest.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 