After an 11-year-old Navajo girl was kidnapped, her family and friends sprang into action to find her. Why did it take so long for law enforcement to join them? The first day I was in Shiprock, New Mexico, a horse made the front page of the local newspaper. The dark bay with a white stripe down its nose had fallen in a field outside town. The article's accompanying photo showed the animal's leg twisted at a startling angle, the white of the bone poking through its torn skin. Locals called animal control, asking someone to put the horse out of its misery, but the county couldn't do anything: It had fallen on Navajo reservation land, and tribal police officers had jurisdiction over the area. The animal languished in the field, in obvious pain, as residents of the area tried to figure out who could legally perform a mercy killing. When tribal police arrived (they'd had a higher-priority call, they told the reporter), they couldn't find the horse. The county sheriff started to get blustery. "Enough was enough," he said. Even if it wasn't technically his responsibility, he couldn't allow the animal's suffering to continue.
Finally, five days after the horse was first reported, a sheriff's deputy drove out to euthanize the injured animal. Right then, a tribal officer pulled up, too. They dragged the horse to a nearby ditch, where the tribal officer shot it in the head. The director of animal control was livid. "This animal had to suffer for five days," she told the paper, "because of jurisdictional issues."
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