ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla. _ The Rottweilers' barking woke Brena Kramer in the darkest part of the January morning, but it was when they fell silent that she got worried. They were chasing something.
She stepped onto the big screened porch and looked toward the barn. A security lamp gave off the only light. Across the yard, she heard an unusual sound _ one of the horses shuffling anxiously in his stall.
Five years earlier, Kramer had turned this property, set back off a railroad access drive, into her dream: a horse rehabilitation center. She took horses nobody else would, ones that needed up to a year of treatment. It was nonstop work, but nothing else gave her the same joy as connecting with horses that had been abused, neglected, sometimes left to die.
They'd need to be fed soon, anyway, so she crossed the backyard. She kept the barn lights off _ after years of routine, she could go by feel and save electricity. She worked her way around the stalls until she came to the last horse, Gus, a chestnut gelding who she'd rescued from a kill pen. Without her, he would've been sent to Mexico to be butchered.
Kramer reached up to feed Gus and kicked a hay bag. Her senses lit up: She'd left the bag hanging on a hook in Gus's stall. She flipped on the lights, and the whole scene hit her at once: hay and treats littering the ground; leads and halters, which she never used except in moving horses off the property, scattered about; and Gus, bound by ropes to two sides of his stall.
She called the Pasco County Sheriff's Office and told deputies what she thought had happened. Someone had tried to kill her horses.
