unwantedhorsesorganization.org
The Problem
The simple truth is that there are more horses than people who want them.
In 2006, more than 100,000 unwanted horses were killed in slaughterhouses in this country. Thousands more were shipped across the border to be slaughtered in Canada and Mexico.
And every day, horse rescue groups across the country are deluged with calls and emails from people who no longer want their horses and hope to surrender them to the rescue groups. Most of these groups are full and have to turn animals away. No one knows how many of these unwanted horses end up becoming a slaughter statistic, or are left to die slowly of neglect in some distant pasture.
There are 9.2 million horses in the United States, based on a report prepared for the American Horse Council in 2005. That study found there are 2 million horse owners in the U.S., and 238,000 of them are actively involved in breeding their horses.
So even as we struggle with the fate of thousands of unwanted horses, each year’s new foal crop adds more horses to the population.
On one level it’s a question of numbers, of supply and demand being out of balance.
The Heart of the Problem
But at the heart of the problem is this: Most people only want a horse as long as it is useful for something. There’s an old saying that sums up this traditional view of horses…
“If you can’t ride ’em, breed ’em, or pack ’em, you can ’em.”
To “can ’em” means to send them to the “canner,” in other words the slaughterhouse where lore has it they’ll end up in a can of dog food. (Forget for the moment that these days horses are slaughtered for European dining tables, not pet food.)
It’s the horse-as-tool mentality, where the animal’s value is measured only by its usefulness to the person.
The Horse Welfare Coalition, an industry group that supports horse slaughter, bluntly summed it up: “The treatment of the horse by the industry is as a commodity.”
The same people who will keep the family dog until it dies of old age at 14 won’t think twice about sending their 20-year old horse off to slaughter because the animal has gone lame and can no longer be ridden.
There’s clearly one standard for “companion” animals and another for horses.
Like other nonprofits involved in rescuing horses, we field plenty of calls from people who claim they can no longer “afford” to keep their lame or blind horse … but somehow have the means to keep their other horses. When we ask why they don’t sell one of their able-bodied horses and keep the infirm one, they act like we’ve lost our minds.
The reason they don’t is because a horse has to be “useful” to be worth the cost of ownership. And once that animal can’t be used for something, it has to go. It’s now another unwanted horse.
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