27 July—It’s time to take a brief break from excoriating totally self-dealing scumbag Donald Trump and his criminally disgusting personal marketing organization masquerading as the federal administration. So here are scumbags and something even more criminally disgusting.

The picture below shows a draft mare called Kachina being dragged behind a truck in Florence, Arizona, in August 2008. (The picture is on the envelope of a recent mailing by Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary in Pueblo, Colorado.)

The story, pieced together from the mailing and news reports, is that Kachina didn’t want to load into a trailer. That’s not unusual equine behavior and can normally be solved with a bit of intelligence, patience, and training—of horse and person. But Kachina’s owner, a scumbag called Gordon Allen Bates, was neither intelligent nor patient. So he tied Kachina to the rear bumper of his pickup truck with a tow strap and pulled her down the road. Because, as he said, he had to move her.

When Kachina could no longer keep up the pace, she collapsed. But the scumbag Bates didn’t stop and instead dragged her down the road for an unspecified distance, probably several miles. Luckily, somebody on the road saw the incredible brutality and called the Pinal County Sheriff’s office.

The scumbag Bates did in fact stop his truck. But only to have his 13-year-old daughter “get out and give her a good kick.” The scumbag daughter, whose name wasn’t released because of her age, did as instructed and kicked Kachina in the nose over and over. When Kachina couldn’t get up, the scumbag father took a pipe from his truck and beat her over the head while his scumbag daughter continued to get her kicks in.

Meanwhile, the sheriff’s deputy followed the trail of blood down the dirt road until he found the scumbag Bateses beating Kachina, who was bleeding from the nose and suffering from countless cuts, contusions, abrasions, open wounds, road burns, and everything else you can imagine.

The deputy witnessed the scumbag Bates father-daughter duo abusing Kachina and reportedly had to draw his weapon to get them to stop, after they’d ignored his repeated orders.

So scumbag Bates father and daughter were arrested on felony animal cruelty charges. But released on their own recognizance. No surprise.

The scumbags were tried in March 2009. Almost as criminally disgusting, then, after a three-day trial the scumbag Bates torture team were found not guilty by a local jury. That’s right, they got off scot free. Why isn’t that surprising? Unfortunately, the transcript of the trial (before 2010) isn’t available online.

Kachinas are Pueblo spirits of things in the real world and it’s unlikely that Kachina was so named by her scumbag abusers. Gordon Allen Bates is or was a geriatric nurse. One shudders to think of the fate of his patients.

The good news it that Kachina recovered from her torture and is now living a presumably good life at a rescue facility. That’s Kachina in the front . . .