Search for missing Las Vegas vet filmed kicking a horse in the face

Police are searching in and around Nevada’s Lake Mead for a veterinarian who disappeared after going viral over a horror video showing him kicking a horse in the face.

Las Vegas vet Dr. Shawn D. Frehner went missing Monday following the backlash from the disturbing video being shared days earlier — with the horse’s horrified owner also pressing charges, FOX5 reported.

Before he disappeared, Frehner had owned up, while claiming that his rough handling of the horse had been twisted.

“I did not blatantly haul off and kick this horse as it appears in the video. That was not my intention at all,” Frehner wrote on social media last week.

“But yes I did kick him right in the chin and I very much do apologize and wish this never happened.”

Emergency services have centered their search on Lake Mead, with the National Park Service working alongside the Las Vegas Metro Police and Red Rock Search and Rescue.

“It’s horrible, I never, ever wished this upon him, I never wished this upon anybody,” Shawna Gonzalez, the owner of the horse the vet was filmed kicking, told 8NewsNow of the urgent search.

“This is not what I wanted in the end at all.”

The footage was filmed Tuesday last week while Frehner was called to administer anesthetic shots to the horse on a property in Pahrump, some 50 miles west of Las Vegas, Gonzalez told the outlet.

“I heard [my mother] yell, ‘Oh my God. He just kicked him,’” recalled Gonzalez, who said she replied: “Oh my god, mom, [the horse] is choking.”

“He wrapped the horse around his neck three times, and he kicked him in the head,” she told the outlet.

“I had started having a severe anxiety attack and couldn’t breathe myself. I was already on the ground, and my daughter picked up the phone and hit record, and that’s when she got him on videotape, kicking him,” Frehner said.

The wounded horse was taken for treatment for abrasions to the skull, Gonzalez said.

In his apology, Frehner said his handling of the horse “was done simply to get the horse in a better position so that he could breathe and get up and move so I could again try to anesthetize.”