Editorial: Criminal Case Worries Vermont Farmers

The Vally News

June 24, 2016

Vermont has certainly changed greatly in the past 40 years, but it has not completely left behind its agrarian roots. Thus, a pending criminal charge against the owner of an 1,800-pound Scottish Highland bull that got loose and caused a fatal car crash last summer on Route 4 in Killington is causing great consternation among farmers and other animal owners.

Craig Mosher, 61, is facing a charge of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the crash, which took the life of Jon Bellis, a Connecticut resident who owned a condo in the area. Bellis’ wife was injured in the collision, in which the bull also died. Mosher has pleaded not guilty to what is believed to be the first criminal charge lodged in Vermont against the owner of an animal that wandered off.

That this is highly unusual can be inferred from the fact that, instead of filing the charge herself, Rutland County State’s Attorney Rose Kennedy took the case before a grand jury. This is rare in Vermont except when a case is particularly complex or is likely to be controversial; this one seems almost certain to be both.

According to police affidavits, Mosher’s two bulls had gotten away from his property and roamed along Route 4 several times in the weeks before the collision and he had been alerted earlier on the night of the fatal crash that one of them was free. Mosher told police that he looked for the animal on his property, was unable to find him, went inside and fell asleep. The prosecution’s burden will be to prove that in so doing, Mosher acted recklessly or with criminal negligence and that those actions directly caused Bellis’ death.

Not surprisingly, farmers fear the precedent that a conviction would set, and many attended a hearing in the case earlier this month. “There are so many ways an animal can get out of a pen; there are so many things that can happen,” says Joe Tisbert, a Cambridge farmer and president of the Vermont Farm Bureau. “And if it’s criminally prosecuted, people are really afraid of what will happen to them.” Besides the criminal penalty, farmers fear that their insurance rates will rise sharply.

Their concern is legitimate. It’s the rare owner of a large animal who has not been forced to go looking for it on occasion when it wandered off through a downed fence or otherwise got loose from its pasture or barn. Nor are escaped animals always readily located and taken home, especially in the dark.

Jerome O’Neil, a Burlington lawyer who is representing the Bellis family, contends that the facts of the case have been distorted and farmers have nothing to fear. “Vermont farmers who take even minimal care of their animals have no need to fear criminal prosecution,” he told Seven Days earlier this month, while also noting that the animals involved were pets, not farm animals. “. . . It has nothing to do with farmers and their responsibilities toward their animals and the public.” 

This is assuredly cold comfort to owners of large animals such as horses or sheep who are not farmers, or at least not full-time farmers. There are plenty of people in that category of “pet-owner.” Nor is it likely to reassure farmers to any great degree, since it is hardly unheard of for farm animals to get loose and roam Vermont highways. Seven Days cited a handful of instances just since 2013.

It may turn out that once the facts are fully explored in the courtroom, they will prove unique, as the prosecutor has suggested, or at least unusual enough to justify the criminal charge. But otherwise, it seems to us the civil courts provide the proper venue for litigating cases in which animals and humans collide in tragic fashion, particularly in a rural state with a rich agricultural tradition.