A beloved miniature horse in Wisconsin has been found dead with an arrow through her chest in what police think may have been an intentional killing.
Penny, a 21-year-old miniature horse owned by Wood Weller, of Lone Rock, was killed sometime between Sept. 26 and Sept. 29, the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement this week.
Weller – who splits his time between Wisconsin and Illinois – learned of Penny’s death when a neighbor called to say they found the pony’s body in a fenced pasture near the county forest last week, he wrote on Facebook.
“When I went…Friday to check, I found she had a crossbow arrow perfectly put in her to the left of center and completely buried in her chest cavity,” the heartbroken owner recalled of the moment he saw Penny’s body for himself.
The sight of Penny’s partially decomposed remains “stopped [him] in [his] tracks,” Weller later told NBC15 News.
”I saw this kind of diagonal blue line. Then as I looked closer, I realized it was a crossbow bolt,” he said of the gruesome injury.
“I was distraught more for what it meant about some person’s bad decision and a darkness that somebody had, to do such a thing.”
Weller is now struggling with how to explain Penny’s death to his young grandchildren, he told the outlet.
”My heart is broken for my grandchildren that have no possible way to put this into context and of course we will not tell them that an arrow killed her,” he lamented.
The Sauk County Sheriff’s Office came out to Weller’s property to inspect Penny’s body and took the arrow as evidence, Weller wrote in his initial Facebook post.
“It will be tested for DNA by Sauk County Forensics, or by us personally if they are not able,” he noted.
According to law enforcement, evidence at the scene indicated that Penny was possibly killed intentionally – and Weller agrees.
“She is white with brown and does not look like a deer!” he wrote on Facebook, dismissing the idea that Penny’s death was a bizarre hunting accident.
“From what [the police officer] saw, and the placement of the arrow, he did not conceive it as being an accident,” Weller said. ”If it had been an accident, the person would’ve called somebody right away, or called the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office to say, ‘Oh, my God!’’’ he reasoned to NBC15.
Weller is offering a $ 1,000 reward for information about what happened to Penny. Those with relevant clues are encouraged to call the local tip line.