Krista Knight/FacebookA carriage driver has been caught on camera kicking a horse that collapsed, telling it: ‘Get up, f*cking lazy b*tch.’
Veterinary nurse Krista Knight filmed the shocking footage in Melbourne, Australia, showing the fallen horse – named Tuesday – and the abusive carriage driver as the public surround him.
As the driver started to shoot at and hit the horse, witnesses begged him to stop, provoking him to lash out at those around him.
Check out the video below (warning: some viewers may find content distressing):
Knight posted the video to her Facebook account, which has been amassing a steady stream of views as people take to the comments to air their outrage, with one user writing: ‘The poor thing. What an arsehole.’
Knight wrote alongside the video:
Kicking a horse is not okay. There were no negative comments only people trying to help. The carriage driver was abusive to civilians and also the this beautiful mare causing her to thrash and bleed from the mouth.
Krista Knight/FacebookAs Knight pleaded with the man to stop abusing the horse, trying to explain it couldn’t move as it was still attached to the carriage, the Unique Carriage Hire driver wrote: ‘Love, I know what I’m doing. Get out of the way.’
While the business’ owner, Dean Crichton, concedes that the driver shouldn’t have called the horse a ‘lazy b*tch’, he says there was no malice in the kick.
Crichton told the MailOnline:
He did not kick that horse with any malice, it was just a nudge like come on get up, like if your mate fell over outside the pub. Wayne lost his cool but it was a very stressful situation with everyone yelling at him. It was out of character for him to use language like that.
It would have been better if that vet had put her phone in her pocket and helped, and they would have got the horse up straight away.
Krista Knight/FacebookAllegedly, Crichton recruited the driver 30 years ago from the streets, and trained him up under his wing. While ‘he’s not the sharpest, he can’t read or write’, he isn’t a ‘burden on society’, and ‘he loves horses and would never hurt them’.
Crichton added:
The horse just stumbled, she wasn’t hurt at all she just needed a bit of help to get up. The last time one of our horses stumbled was five years ago, you see more kids fall over in Federation Square in five minutes.
Tuesday was back at work the next day, having suffered no injuries in the incident.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.