Photo of Cooper when he was a youngster.
By DorinDa TrouTman, rmr sTaff wriTer Pat Cregan has raised the award offered from $1,000 to $2,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer of her horse, Cooper. The gelding was a very friendly, eight-year- old Rocky
Mountain Horse Cregan had raised from a foal and was a favorite riding horse. He was killed Saturday, May 18, 2013. Cooper, along with Cregan’s five
other horses, had been taken off pasture the previous evening and put into a corral next to Cregan’s home on Moise Lane, north of Stevensville, Montana.
Award Raised for Killer Who Strangled Horse “Cooper was just fine Friday night.
Full of life and even playing with his ball,” says Cregan. The next morning a relative of
Cregan’s ran into the house in alarm when he found Cooper dead in the corral. The gelding had been choked to death with an extremely tight rope — an act of ligature strangulation. Cregan called the Ravalli County Sheriff’s office and two officers arrived to examine the body. The rope around Cooper’s neck had multiple knots in it, and had been pulled so tight it was cutting into the horse’s neck. Cregan did not recognize the rope, which had been cut off cleanly a short distance from the knots. The officers said that “they had never seen an animal die in this manner” and ruled it a human-caused death.
A month later, Cregan was still trying
to get over the horror of Cooper’s death, and she described her horse with a catch in her voice.
“I bought Cooper as a colt in
Colorado, and when he was old enough I put him through horsemanship style training. He was such a character — he
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had a real personality. He was even a little snot sometimes. He loved to play and mess with me. If I had a brush in my back pocket, he would take it out. He would snuggle up so sweetly and then gently nip me. If I put a radio up on the corral fence, he would knock it off. He loved to play tug of war with his rubber feed dish –just like a dog. He was so friendly he would walk right up to anyone.”
Cregan’s property is in a rural area of
five- to twenty-acre parcels. A friend and neighbor of Cregan had security cameras which recorded footage of the nervous and erratic movements of the Cregan horses on the night Cooper died. She noted that the following day, the
horses were not right. They only grazed sporadically. They moved back and forth between the corral where Cooper was killed and far out in the pasture. “His buddy, a white mare, kept checking back to the corral and barn as if looking for him,” she says. Neither Cregan or her neighbor
believe that this was a random attack.
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