Reward bigger for cruelty to horses incident

The owner of seven horses on the south side of Clovis is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person who set off a box of fireworks in the barn where the horses were in their stalls.

Captian Roman Romero of the Clovis Police department described the video of the incident captured by a security camera as “a gut punch.”

“I watched the video,” Romero said. “The horses are really friendly, following the suspect.”

Then the perpetrator sets off the fireworks subjecting the horses to what Romero called “the stimulus responsible for their injuries.”

Romero said police responded to the scene of the incident in the 600 block of S. Reid Street at about 5 a.m. Wednesday.

Romero says he knows the video has been posted to social media.

“It needs to be,” he said. “We will need help from the public to find this person and to hold them accountable.”

“The reward will get bigger,” horse owner Renee Guthrie said. “I’ve had a lot of people call and say they’d like to add to the reward.”

Renee and her husband Ronnie have seven horses in their barn, stalls and property. She said two of the horses were injured.

“They were wigged out and freaked out,” Guthrie said of the horses. “The one closest to the fireworks has tiny black marks on her coat.”

Guthrie saw the box of fireworks in the security video. She described it as about 10 or 12 inches by 18 inches.

“It was a big package of some kind of specialized fireworks,” she said. “We found the box, it had to have been worth $250 to $300. There were 63 shots.”

How are the horses behaving after the incident? Guthrie says the horses are usually very friendly but Wednesday they were “very scared, very skittish.”

Does she have any suspects in mind?

“It might be somebody in the neighborhood, I don’t know,” Guthrie said. “I’ve turned it over to law enforcement.”