Rancher denies he starved horses, says they were poisoned

ALLIANCE, Neb. - The sheer numbers of it can be staggering: as many as 100 horses dead on a ranch that was supposed to be a safe haven. It's being called the largest equine cruelty investigation in Nebraska history.

It's centered around the Three Strikes Ranch, located outside of the town of Alliance in the Nebraska panhandle.

For the past two years, trailers full of wild mustangs have been unloaded at Jason Meduna's ranch. He adopts wild horses from the Bureau of Land Management. They are horses no one else wants.

This week, trucks came to take the horses away. The Morrill County Sheriff's Office is investigating whether Meduna starved his horses.

"The people who work with me or who have been here laugh at those allegations because they know that it's not true," Meduna said.

"I'll starve myself before I starve a horse," he said. "I don't eat until they eat."

"We need to figure out what went wrong and get these horses out of here so they can get better," Jill Starr with Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue said.

The Morrill County District Attorney has charged Meduna with one count of felony animal cruelty after one of his horses died. Nearly 70 others appear dangerously thin.

"Many of them are boney and look like their skin is just hanging off their bones. Their ribs are showing, you can see their skeleton through their hides basically," Starr said.

Starr trains wild horses in California and came to help get the horses off Meduna's land.

"I don't know if the rancher is a bad guy. I know something really bad happened here," she said.

Meduna says in January he had roughly 300 horses. According to court documents, there are now 175 left.

"The herd size is close to half of what it was when I was here in the summer," Jodi Messenich with Zuma's Rescue Ranch in Littleton, Colo., said. "He took on more than this land could handle without supplemental hay for the winter."

"We made our own hay. We buy hay. We've used an excessive amount of hay this year. In a matter of two months, we used probably $28,000 spent on hay. My wife was working two full-time jobs so that we could make sure everything was well maintained with the horses," Meduna said.

A local veterinarian, Dr. Tom Furman, has performed necropsies on three of the horses that have died.

"All three horses show serious atrophy of fat, that's where the body starts to mobilize fat that it shouldn't, like the fat that surrounds the coronary arteries of the heart," Furman said.

Some of the surviving horses have swollen bellies, suggesting they could be full of parasites from eating their own manure.

Meduna says it isn't a case of starvation, but poisoning. He believes his horses are sick because someone poisoned them.

He says he noticed a change back in November, shortly after 9NEWS first visited the ranch.

"Little by little, I had more and more of these horses doing this. I had horses like Joe in the range ground doing the same feeding program and everything. Then you have one that would just drop weight and all that," Meduna said. "I was taking pictures and I was forwarding them to people I might know, [asking], 'Have you ever dealt with these symptoms before, 'cause I've never seen this.'"

9NEWS first met Meduna last year when we did a profile on his ranch.

He hired a veterinarian to test his horses for toxicity, but the sheriff's office did not wait for the results. All the remaining horses are now in the county's custody.

"He can blame it on whatever he wants, but this is a lack of food a lack of nutrition, I don't know what happened out there, I don't know what he did, and at this point I don't care," Jerry Finch with Habitat for Horses said.

"It'll blow over, and they'll realize that I am the real deal when it comes to horses and they'll see that we do need to prevent this from happening to somebody else," Meduna said.

"These horses are my friends," he said. "You cannot put me in a bigger hell than I'm going through, and again, I'll go through it for these guys."