I'm in two minds. One of things I didn't see fully explained was who owned the ranch, was it something the production owned and staffed or was it a stable of another company that was hired for animal care? If you hire a firm to look after your animals, and they **** up, well, the final responsability always remains with you but you're not at fault for expecting the animal keepers you outsource to, to know their job.
It's nice to see some care was taken to treat animals well on set, but clearly housing off-set is just as important to animal care as on-set. That latter may have been overlooked too much.
Also, horses are expensive animals, especially movie horses. It boggles the mind that a valuable asset like that would be so mistreated, not once but twice. Not putting horses on lands riddled with sinkholes seems obvious, so I wonder whether we know everything in the story.
Still, it's very sad that animals lost their lives or were injured when it could have been prevented and New Line is responsible as far as I am concerned. But I won't say they're actually at fault with only so much information.
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