“Regrettable” is one word that comes to mind when considering the rise and fall of Equine Angels Rescue.

Founder and director Pam Vivirito, of Cabot, announced this week the 4-year-old nonprofit organization was dissolving.

Vivirito credits Equine Angels with rescuing 148 horses from abuse or neglect during that four-year period. She blamed the demise on negative news coverage, saying, “We were fine until all that bad publicity. People believe what they read.”

That’s a bitter observation from an organization that used the media in its rapid climb into the public eye.

In its heyday, Equine Angels would invite TV news organizations to come along on its missions to confront animal owners and allege misuse of their animals; with the TV cameras rolling, these surprise attacks invariably resulted in overwhelmed and intimidated horse owners timidly signing their animals over to the organization, and Equine Angels then would “adopt” these horses in exchange for a contribution of $300 or more.

Equine Angels welcomed the news coverage as long as the story remained one-sided in its portrayal of Equine Angels as a mission of mercy.

Indeed, there’s an ongoing massive need for an organization like Equine Angels. There is a glut of horses, which means they are cheap and available as pets. But many of the new owners are not qualified to care for a horse. They lack experience. They lack resources. The net result is that many horses suffer from neglect and abuse.

But from the very start, the problem with Equine Angels’ approach has been that it made itself the sole judge of what constitutes neglect. There was no protocol for prosecuting equine neglect, a point Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger brought up when he declined to press criminal charges against the accused owners.

Without any protocol, there was no accountability — a condition that tended to amplify every appearance of discrepancy in Equine Angels’ operations. The lack of protocol gave the appearance of an arbitrary nature to Equine Angels’ seizures, a condition that might be seen as an infringement of the constitutional right to due process.

It was simply a matter of time before the accused owners realized their cases were not prosecutable — that Equine Angels had failed to give Goldinger enough evidence to prove neglect — and so they first fought to have the charges dropped, then they sued Equine Angels demanding the return of their horses.

The lawsuit, which alleged the horses were improperly taken, eventually was settled for $105,000 in the horse owners’ favor. The settlement includes provisions for the plaintiffs to retrieve their horses and allowed state officials to inspect the horse owners’ farms for six months.

It was not a case of bad publicity. It was a case of bad policy.

Since then, Goldinger — who is a horse owner — has assembled a formal protocol for prosecuting equine abuse and neglect. The protocol has drawn interest from other Pennsylvania counties and officials interested in using it as a template for their own protocol. It’s the missing piece that could have elevated Equine Angel Rescue’s mission to the noble standard it had intended all along.

Too bad Equine Angels won’t be around to use the protocol. And the saddest note to the organization’s swan song is that horses will go on suffering from neglect and abuse, and probably will do so in alarming numbers.