Men Plead Guilty to Mustang Murders

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Two men changed their pleas Wednesday and acknowledged that they shot and killed five wild mustangs in Nevada in a case that flooded U.S. prosecutors with thousands of e-mails from around the world expressing outrage at the slaughter.

Todd Davis, 45, admitted in federal court in Reno that he and Joshua Keathley, 36, had been drinking and used "poor judgment" when they shot the horses with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle in November near the Nevada-California line.

Poor judgment is getting drunk and driving your car into a tree. Poor judgment is trying to ride your bike over a ramp, flipping it, and breaking your leg. Poor judgment is not killing five horses.

Prosecutors said they offered no plea bargain and intend to seek the maximum penalty of one year in jail and $100,000 fine for each at the sentencing set for Sept. 14.

Here's hoping this is one case that actually goes right.

"We'd been drinking a little," Davis said. "We saw some horses and used poor judgment and shot a few of them."

Why were they drunk in the middle of nowhere? Why did they even have a gun while they were drunk in the middle of nowhere?

Keathley said the two were looking for places to do some trapping when they came across the horses in the rugged high-desert rangeland on the edge of the Sierra Nevada.

Is that legal out there? Must be.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sue Fahami said they shot into a herd of eight to 10 horses and watched at least four fall to their deaths.

"There has been great public interest in this case. And it's not just in Washoe County, not just in Nevada, not just in the United States," she said. "We've received e-mails from all over the world."

The men were charged in January with "maliciously causing the death of a wild horse" after the U.S Bureau of Land Management offered a $10,000 reward and the Humane Society of the United States added $2,500 for any information leading to criminal convictions in the case.

Some horse protection advocates had criticized the government's decision to charge the two men with only one horse's death. Fahami said that was due in part to the inability to determine which man shot which horse.

So instead of charging them both with one horse death, how about we charge them both with two each? Or, we could charge them with five each. Stand by and watch the other guy do it and you're just as guilty as he is.