CountryByNet.com Forums :: Horse slaughter

Ok here's the answer Rich. You paid what nothing for those horses? Would you pay $1200 for each one of them? If that is the case then why not go to a sale or a private individual and buy a horse that is well bred, is healthy, is something that people would want. Would you have still taken those horses if you knew you were going to have to put thousands of dollars in future vet bills into them and still not have them be able to be ridden or anything? Now say I am the avg. Joe that owns a horse. The horse gets sick or gets lame and I don't have the money to take care of him. I take him to the sale. Now say you aren't at the sale. Nobody buys the horse because he's lame. Now what? Are you going to take every horse in the country and buy them for $1200? No of course not. Now you will probably say you would have bought those two horses anyway but what about the thousands of other horses? What about the owner that has nowhere to go with a horse that has no value to anyone and noone else will even take him? Then the horse goes back home and the owner won't put money into him and sits out back and dies a terrible death. What about that? Where is the place for a sick or crippled horse?

Now let's turn this around even more. Let's say the two horses that you bought were crippled. What then? You did get a few of the horses that go through that are ok. Not great but ok. Now go try and sell those horses. Most places even if they were fit you wouldn't get $500 for them. If you can sell them for more let me know because I can buy them all day at sales that I go to.

You are taking one isolated incident and making that the makeup of the entire problem and that isn't so. In my post I said the MAJORITY of the hroses that go to slaughter are horses that nobody wants or are crippled or sick. That is most certainly the case. Last year 56,000 horses were slaughtered. The rough estimate is that of these maybe 500 were rescued. So we're talking about 1% of those that go to slaughter actually have any value at all.

This is the problem is that someone like yourself steps and says well look what happened with me. Well that's great and you are a great guy and great for what you did. But that does nothing to solve the problem of taking a horse that is sick, crippled, not wanted, etc. There are very few "dog pounds" for horses.

I'm not trying to put you down in any way. Just that what you relate is not the true picture in any sense. At every sale I go to you know who the slaughter buyers are and very rarely do they get the good horses. They don't even want the good horses because they bring too much money. They won't pay very much either.

Feel free to say more please. This is what I wanted to hear is why people think this isn't a good idea. If you can give me an answer as to where the unwanted, crippled, sick, deformed, mean, etc. horses should go then I'm all for it. If you can tell me that it would be better for these horses to be transported thousands of miles to another country for slaughter because we don't want to deal with it then I am all for it.

Now lastly I would like you to be aware of the fact that these horses came from a meat market. I suspect that is not the case here. First of all the only slaughter houses left are in TX. It seems rather strange that someone would buy these horses in TX in the shape you say they were in and send them all the way to the East Coast. I suppose it is possible they were purchased in Canada but again I'm not sure there either. Most of this is being done to advance these people's agenda. They will take horses like this and say they came from this and that but usually it isn't the case.

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