Carolina carriage company accused of mishandling horse's injury

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A South Carolina carriage company has been accused of negligence after a woman saw a bleeding carriage horse with a detached horseshoe.

"A horse was bleeding with a detached shoe ... all the way down (the street)," Zoë Bergmann wrote Sunday in a Facebook post. "The driver and the passengers paid no attention to the injured horse. A woman unknown to me ran down Market Street screaming for them to stop. They would have kept going if the attention hadn't been brought to them."

Her post, which has been shared more than 16,000 times, includes photos, some of which showed pools of what's assumed to be the horse's blood.

Bergmann said workers at Classic Carriage Works gathered around the horse "and then proceeded to try and quickly rip off the shoe with no tools or compassion."

A woman speaking in the video said the horse's hoof didn't come off, but rather a piece of fabric placed between the hoof and pad. Tim Manley, general manager of Classic Carriage, said the "chunk of hoof" that Bergmann referred to was just oakum, a material made of a mixture of hemp and pine tar used to provide extra padding.

Workers said the blood might have seemed like a lot, but for an animal of Berry's size, it wasn't.

"(There are a) lot of people saying a lot of things, (and) they don't actually know what they're talking about," Manley told WCIV.

Cox Media Group