9‑month sentence in case of starved horses
By LEVI PULKKINEN
Published Oct 17 2008
Lilly was a foal when animal control officers saved her from Jean Marie Elledge’s pasture.
Skinny and sick, she was still better off than the four horses found dead on the Carnation property. Horse rescue workers thought there might be a chance for her.
Their hopes, though, were misplaced. Lilly was euthanized weeks later when it became clear she wouldn’t recover from the parasites Elledge had allowed to linger in her.
“We cried over her, and we apologized to her for what had happened to her,” said Bonnie Hammond, a Save a Forgotten Equine worker who took Lilly on a final walk before she was put down.
“We’ll never know the horse she could have been,” she said.
Hammond was among several animal rescue workers who spoke Friday against Elledge, 57, at a sentencing hearing in King County Superior Court.
In the end, Judge Jeffrey Ramsdell sentenced Elledge, who pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree animal cruelty, to nine months in jail for mistreating her horses.
“People treat cars better than she treated these horses,” Ramsdell said. “Frankly, it’s despicable.”
Animal control officers who raided Elledge’s pasture in February found nine severely malnourished horses, as well as four already deceased. Elledge had been boarding and breeding horses at the location.
Animal control officers said she was feeding them small quantities of poor quality hay and allowing them to starve each winter.
Contrary to proper practice, Elledge’s mares were almost always pregnant or nursing without a break between foals. Most of the animals, according to court documents, had never seen a veterinarian or been shod.
Jaime Taft, a horse rescue worker also with Save a Forgotten Equine, told Ramsdell the horses showed evidence of years of neglect. Elledge, she said, hadn’t simply fallen on money problems.
“She was breeding them. She was hoping to get money out of them,” Taft said. “This person clearly had no concern for the animals’ suffering.”
Help was never more than a phone call away, Taft said.
Elledge, who’d previously been arrested on animal abuse charges in Snohomish County, told the judge she had no idea her horses were in such poor health.
Attempting to contradict police and a former worker at her pasture, Elledge said she usually fed her horses high-grade hay. Only in the past two years had financial pressures forced her to buy lower quality feed, she said.
“I’m trying myself to understand what happened,” Elledge said. “I didn’t see the horses starving.”
Elledge’s sisters asked for leniency to allow Elledge to continue to care for her teenage nephew, who lives with her. Through her attorney, Elledge requested that she be sentenced to two months on home detention.
But Ramsdell was not swayed by Elledge’s pleas, opting for the longer sentence.
Allowing that Elledge may not be well mentally, Ramsdell noted that she had no difficulty taking care of herself or, by her sisters’ accounts, her nephew. He said he was forced to conclude that she simply did not care what happened to the horses.
