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COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — High hay prices and the dour administration are core blamed for a growing number of stallion owners who are giving up and abandoning or neglecting their animals in Western states.

In 2007 and 2008, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department in Idaho accepted three times more reports of abuse regarding horses, donkeys or mules than it did in 2005 and 2006, before-mentioned Capt. Ben Wolfinger.

In the accomplished three months, Angie Hilding has given away nine horses she couldn’t afford to keep. Ordinarily, the Hayden, Idaho, ranch owner would maintain older horses at her facility, which offers trail rides, lessons and boarding. But like many owners, Hilding has seen hay prices skyrocket by more than 60 percent.

“When you’re in the business we’re in, you keep those old horses,” Hilding told The Spokesman-Review. “But when the going gets tough, we find a home for these older ones.”

Not everybody is so diligent.

The state Brand Department, a separate part of the Idaho State Police, has seen more than 40 horses abandoned in the past year in the southern part of the rank, many of them turned out on public lands, said Jim Kennedy, who oversees the northern district.

Livestock investigators have also seen somebody new: horses left in corrals with other people’s horses or dropped off at public sales by owners who then vanish.

Just greatest week, a meridional Idaho connect was charged with multiple counts of creature brutishness after authorities seized more than 30 underfed horses, cats and dogs from a farm in Payette County last month.

“It’sitting boiled into disgrace to feeding the family or feeding the horses,” said Bill Barton, predicament veterinarian by the Idaho State Department of Agriculture. “I’m hearing it from my counterparts in total the Western states, and I’m audience it from Kentucky. I don’privately think we’ve seen the extent of the problem yet.”

In Wyoming, state Brand Commissioner Lee Romsa said he would normally handle six to eight cases involving abandoned domestic horses per year. This year, he has dealt with at least 41 such cases. In Oregon, state officials found 11 vicious domestic horses, all sickly and starving, in September on a rural road in the Willamette Valley.

Montana also has seen a “significant increase” in the riddle, said a Montana Department of Livestock prolocutor.

In Washington state, Jean Marie Elledge, 57, of Monroe, was sentenced to a year in jail for animal cruelty on the model of several dead and starving horses were found earlier this year at her properties in Monroe and Carnation. Elledge was ordered to serve her Snohomish County sentence after completing a nine-month sentence in King County.