Bloody steer dragged on Judd Road when floor of trailer fails

On Sept. 20 at around 2 p.m., Suzanne Jones was heading to her Judd Road home in Sumpter Township when she saw drag marks on the roadway.
She was coming west on Judd Road from Martinsville Road heading to her home west of Sumpter Road. The drag marks started before Martinsville Road and went on for more than a mile.
Soon, along with the drag marks, she saw hunks of fresh meat.
A horse trailer was stopped at the four-way stop at Judd and Sumpter roads and police made drivers go through the party store parking lot to get around the blocked corner.
She saw in the back inside of the trailer the two back legs of a black horse and a tail that was waving slowly back and forth in the wind. Pieces of a meat were everywhere, she said.
She was told that the steer and horse were being taken to be slaughtered when the floor of the trailer fell out. She said there were long trails of blood on the asphalt and the Sumpter Fire Department was trying to hose off the blood.
The injured animals were placed in a nice trailer to continue their ride. Jones said they were not dead.
“I don’t want that to happen to any other animal,” Jones said. “I know they were being taken to slaughter, but that is no excuse for them to be tortured like that.
“Trailers should be inspected,” Jones said. “When you see the outside of a trailer is badly rusted, you wonder what does the floor inside look like.”
Jones said she was willing to work to require inspections of trailers to carry animals.
She said there are lots of people in rural Sumpter Township who have horses and other animals. And, while some of the trailers are fine, some are in bad repair.
Also, Jones wants the driver to be charged with something, at least animal cruelty. She said he must have felt the dragging as he drove along and probably wouldn’t have stopped if it weren’t a four-way-stop intersection.
Sumpter Township Police Chief Eric Luke said the driver was cited for spilling his load, a misdemeanor with a penalty of $500 and or 90 days in jail.
Chief Luke said the police officer’s report of the incident states that the driver was hauling a trailer containing a bull he was transporting to a slaughter house. According to the report, the driver said that he heard a loud thud and stopped to find that the animal’s legs had broken through the bottom of the trailer and were dragging on the pavement, causing injury to its hooves/legs and resulting in quite a bit of blood loss on the roadway.
The animal was subsequently transferred to another trailer for transport and the Sumpter Township Fire Department was called out to wash down the blood on the roadway, Chief Luke said.
Jones said there were two animals and she certainly knows what a horse looks like. Her coworker said he saw the horse’s front legs on the floor of the trailer, so maybe the horse didn’t fall through like the steer did. She said she will never forget the black horse tail waving back and forth in the wind.