I was reading about a town in NC where there have been several incidents of someone cutting off horse's tails! This is horrible for obvious reasons but there is one thing I noticed when I read several articles covering the story. Charges were mentioned that included trespassing, theft and vandalism but nothing about animal abuse. That's just plain wrong, in my opinion.
Here's one of the links if you want to see the whole story:
http://www.wxii12.com/news/15555177/detail.html