A Texas jury has unanimously found a former Texas A&M University faculty member and veterinarian guilty of felony cruelty to a livestock animal, a prosecutor says.
Brian Baker, the first assistant district attorney for Brazos County, said the jury took only around an hour Wednesday to convict Ashlee Watts. Watts’s attorney didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Thursday. Baker said sentencing is set for Dec. 6.
The magazine The Chronicle of the Horse reported that the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners revoked Watts’s veterinary license earlier this year after an investigation into her using a cattle prod on a horse named Allie. A Texas A&M spokesperson said this incident occurred in December 2019 at the university’s veterinary teaching hospital.
The horse wouldn’t stand after waking from a surgical procedure, and Watts shocked her face, ears, muzzle and other areas before leaving her alone to rest and, soon after, die, the magazine reported. A Texas A&M veterinary technician then filed a complaint with the Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners and provided video of the incident.
A university spokesperson said Watts was a tenured associate professor whose last day of teaching and patient care was in October 2021. She resigned from the university effective October 2022.
In a statement, John August, dean of the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, said in part, “This case involving a former faculty member has been deeply troubling for clinicians, students, support staff and leadership, not just at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences but for the public and, particularly, the equine community as well. We firmly believe that the incident is not in any way representative of the care we strive to provide to the nearly 27,000 animals that visit our Small and Large Animal Teaching hospitals each year.”
