VALLEY CENTER (KGTV) - A house of horrors is what owners Brenda and Travis Fox came home to after evicting the founders of HiCaliber Horse Ranch.
Stepping out of your car, you smell the manure. "This is appalling," Veterinarian Adrienne Moore said.
Moore unearthed a plastic bag in a pile of horse manure with small horse bones. She believes it was a still birth. She found shoulder and rib bones, hair she postulated either from the mane or tail.
The HiCaliber Horse Ranch came under scrutiny, accused of buying sickly horses at auction then killing them at the horse ranch.
"As far as the eye can see and what we're walking on right now is still the manure pile," Travis Fox said there were five piles six feet deep of manure. In one of the pens, you can see the manure pushed through the fence, spilling into a river.
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In the main house, cat poop dumped on the roof, bird poop next to banisters, and windowsills. "[You can see] where the animals were tied and when they were bored chewed on the furniture," Brenda Markstein-Fox said.
In the yellow guest house she said they found, "animal feces on all the rugs, and inside here you can see animals chewing up the walls, that means animals were locked into these places and left."
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"Walking through you want to cry for what happens here, you get enraged with what these animals have been put through," Moore said.
The couple started the eviction in March and were finally able to come in and start the clean up last Thursday, "it smells like death and crap," Travis said.
"I go back to the, oh I'm sorry," Brenda said, tears welling up in her eyes, "I go back to the joy, that we actually had here, I go back to the gatherings we had here and it's really hard to watch and see this, you almost feel like, oooh, not just taken advantage of." She said they felt violated.
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She and her husband called it the Pura Vida Ranch and lived there for 6 years before moving to Nevada. They wanted to make a difference and rented the property not to a bed and breakfast, or AirBnB, but to HiCaliber, hoping the property would be a horse rehabilitation center and special education enrichment facility.
Moore opened the "medical" freezer in the horse barn and showed us a horse leg, mutilated chicken and said there used to be a dead bobcat stored in there as well. Throughout each home, alcohol bottles were strewn about. Trash litered every surface. Brenda said the property looks incredibly better compared to a week prior.
The couple filed a lawsuit against the founder of HiCaliber for damages. Travis said they are inventorying all the repairs they have to make.
The founder of the non-profit said on social media all the damage was normal wear and tear.
