Horse Slaughter/Eductation

(rendering the carcass
useless for human consumption) is sufficiently high that most slaughter
plants will not pay for grey horses until after slaughter, and will not pay
for them at all if they have internal melanomas. Greys are real money
losers for them

Which just means they have to wait a little longer for their money. When somone takes a horse to slaughter (I only know first hand about Bel Tex in Ft.Worth, the #1 slaughterhouse in the U.S., & get my info from a local killer buyer who takes horses there at least once a week on Mondays and has been "killing horses" (his words) since before I was born & I'm 36) that it takes at least 2 weeks to get your money. They mail you a check. This is because payment is based on weight & they don't weight them in immediately. It is also based on the grade of meat. Just like your beef from the grocery store is graded, so is horse meat, and regardless of what you've heard, there is no one set price per pound for horsemeat. Anyone can call the slaughterhouse and check - they'll tell you.

To comment about everyone who is blaming the breeders, I must stick up for them (the breeders). I am not a breeder. Personally, I would feel too guilty to breed, but that is just my personal opinion. If you were to look, you will find that there is not one single statistic pointing conclusively to overbreeding leading to slaughter.

I know this is an impassioned belief, to believe that if there were fewer horses that fewer horses would go to slaughter, but it simply can't be backed up statistically. To do so, one must research the number of new registrations for each breed each year for the past several years, and then correlate that to the number of horses in that breed (including grade horses). The things that lead to slaughter are: greed, laziness, & ignorance, and nothing else. Greed because of the people who are in the slaughter business, from auction owners to truck drivers, to back-yard killers such as the one in my neighborhood. Laziness because it is & always will be easier to send a horse to the slaughterhouse because it is injured than it is to pay for a vet to treat it or to place a for sale ad for a healthy, sound, even rideable horse. Ignorance is not knowing, not appreciating who and what a horse is. It's easy to look at our own horses as friends and companions, but it's not so easy to look at all horses as such. It is very, very difficult to look at each horse as unique, as something that matters, if only for what it's species stands for.

I do not wish to single out the person who sent the message about the endurance prospect that turned out to be lame and scarred up, but I do wish to use that as an example for the point I am trying to make. All that person wanted to do was to help others by warning them away from this horse. Where does anyone suppose that horse is going to end up? Even if someone who doesn't know about horses buys it, they will eventually discover the horse is lame, and then where will the horse end up? Unless it gets very lucky, it will end up in a slaughterhouse one way or another, even if it must be sold to someone out of state to put it through auction and ship it to slaughter. It isn't an unwanted horse. As I read that post, I was hoping that horse was near me. I want it! I'd love to take that horse in, fix it up as much as possible, and then find it a permanent home where it could function to the best of it's ability, even if that ability is just a pasture ornament. There is no such thing as an unwanted horse, and somewhere, there is someone like me, who wants that horse. It's just a matter of opinion and how each of us value a horse that is a complete stranger that can offer us no practical use.

Ignorarance, as in "the lack of knowledge" (& that is all that ignorance ever is, it is not an insult to be ignorant, all of us are ingorant about something, probably many things, in fact) is best demonstrated in the following quote from this list:

Obviously, this person doesn't hate horses, she just doesn't know that the "short trip to euthanasia" is literally getting the pee scared out of you, smelling the blood, smelling the death, being crowded in with a bunch of strange, terrified horses, and then herded roughly into a kill chute to have your head bashed in and if you're very lucky, that's your last memory.

Most people on this list are in a position to help. Corrie Ten-Boom once said, "Everyone is either a missionary or a mission field." While not everyone can personally save a horse, everyone can educate, donate, or volunteer. There are so many horse rescues in the world, but the number of volunteers and workers is miniscule compaired to the number of people who know about the problem, but do nothing.

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