Newton officials order mini horse Clover removed, saying she violates ‘large animal’ rules. Her owner plans to sue.

Clover the miniature horse in her yard. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

Clover’s days in Newton may be numbered. But the miniature horse’s owner says her story isn’t over just yet.

City health officials on Monday denied an appeal by the miniature horse’s owner to keep Clover in the yard of her Auburndale home. The 28.5-inch, 165-pound mini horse, they said, must be removed from the property by Oct. 19.

But the mini horse’s owner, Judy Hinchey, said she plans to sue the city to keep Clover right where she is.

“The commissioner [of Newton’s health department] had said to me, ‘Well, we took it in good faith that you had followed the rules,’” she said in a Tuesday interview. “That makes me want to fight it even more.”

Health officials said Hinchey’s yard does not meet the health requirements for “large animals” – namely, that manure must be stored 100 feet from lot lines. Neighbors had previously complained of the smell of manure, though Hinchey said she’s taken steps to mitigate the smell.

Hinchey has argued that, for various reasons, Clover should not be treated the same as a full-size horse. That distinction, she noted, is one made by several other localities in Massachusetts, but not Newton.

But public health director Lisa Heyer, in her ruling against the appeal, said those arguments were not convincing.

“A miniature horse is a breed of horse and thus, based solely on the plain language of the regulations, constitutes a Large Animal,” Heyer said. “The regulation ... does not include any exception or threshold based on the size of the horse. The fact that a horse may be small does not remove the animal from the category of ‘horse.’”

Hinchey said that, when she didn’t hear back from the city immediately after her Sep. 15 appeal, she assumed the city would be revising its regulations to reflect the nuance of the situation.

“I assumed it was that they were fixing the regulations because they’re so poorly worded,” she said. “But no, they didn’t.”

At issue is a section of Newton’s health code that sets out regulations for “large animals” kept in stables. In Hinchey’s view, it’s ridiculous to treat Clover, who is roughly the size of a Great Dane, as a “large animal.”

She also pointed out that the city doesn’t treat all animals of the same species equally: Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, for example, are exempt from most regulations applying to regular pigs.

But that narrow distinction, Heyer said, is not a matter of size, but rather the fact that pot-bellied pigs are, like dogs and cats, “traditionally kept in homes as house pets” rather than in separate stalls.

“I do not find the analogy to swine and pot belly pigs compelling,” she said.

Heyer suggested that the manure odor concerns were immaterial to the city’s decision; the issues with the property meant that “no site visit was necessary to evaluate either the application or this appeal.”

The ruling has left Hinchey incensed. She said that, rather than fairly engaging with her arguments, officials took more than a year to make a decision they could have reached a year ago.

Since receiving zoning approval for the stall, Hinchey said she’d invested roughly $100,000 into turning her vision for a therapeutic mini horse practice into reality. That included razing her backyard and building a stall and enclosure for Clover.

“If I try to sell my house, it’s definitely not worth what it was a year ago, when it had nice green grass and not a shelter,” she said.

Hinchey said she is actively considering filing a lawsuit against the city. That would potentially allow her to keep Clover at her home for at least a little while longer.

A city spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

But she acknowledged that dragging the process out could make it more painful in the end.

“If I lose, it [will have been] a whole year” living with Clover, she said. ”I’ll really have bonded with her.”