COWETA COUNTY, Ga. — A Coweta County man was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in late September after a mom and her son called 911, saying they’d seen him walking down the road and repeatedly hitting a horse.
According to a report from a Coweta County Sheriff’s deputy, Kenneth Bullard was seen “punching, kicking, and hitting a horse with a long stick” while walking through a Coweta County neighborhood.
During an interaction with the deputy, Bullard said he was “preparing for the end of the world and that he was one of the riders of Christ in the Bible.” According to the report, Bullard kept repeating this claim, which “indicated that he may not be completely mentally stable,” the report says.
When he found Bullard, he told him to drop the stick. Instead, Bullard started walking toward the deputy with the stick in his hand and told the deputy not to put his hands on him.
According to the report, the deputy pulled out his county-issued Taser and told Bullard to drop the stick, then called for backup over his radio.
Bullard dropped the stick and, at the deputy’s orders, tied the horse to a tree, according to the arrest report.
The horse was “visibly distressed,” according to the deputy’s report.
Bullard told the deputy he had drugs on him and emptied his pockets, the arrest report says.
He told the deputy that he was “from the Bible,” continuing to claim to be a “rider of Christ” and added that he knew how to take care of his horse.
As for the condition of the horse, the report said when the deputy went to check on it, he saw that it “had what appeared to be welts along the neck and some blood on the snout. The horse also had a liquid dripping from its underside that I would believe to be urine,” and was trying to escape.
Bullard spoke with members of Coweta Cares, a mental health program, and told them “he was beating his horse so that it could survive the end of the world and he was not trying to kill it to make it stronger.”
At some point, the horse “had broken free and ran back home,” the arrest report said.
As a result of the interaction with law enforcement and his treatment of the horse, Bullard was charged with cruelty to animals. The marijuana that Bullard had on his person was submitted into evidence to be destroyed, according to the deputy.
At a mental health facility, Bullard was said to “continue to be resistant” and said that he “doesn’t care that his there and that in a few days he will be out, go home and do it all over again.”
The Coweta County Sheriff’s Office said Animal Control would take over the reporting on mistreatment of horses to the Department of Agriculture, and that enough evidence was there for the possible removal of the horses from the premises.