Aside from not hearing a fire alarm or something.
I'd like to chime in with twhrider and Rosi M in blaming the closing of slaughter plants with the horse market's decline. Here in the midwest, there are free horses and unwanted horses all over the place. People are still breeding their junky stallion to a pasture full of mares, and the results are now scrubby weanlings with no feed in front of them. Nobody wants them, they aren't well bred or trained, and are not worth anything. Even well-trained horses that people have invested time and money on are only going for $300 to $500. What can you do? 1. Educate yourself and others. The slaughter ban should be revoked, and the plants themselves should have regulations to follow ensuring no abuse and as humane an end as possible. 2. Stop breeding un-valuable horses. Basically stop breeding unless you are prepared to give the foal a life-long home if there is no buyer to give it a better home. If you are not prepared to feed and train the foal that results from owning a mare and breeding her, then don't breed in the first place. 3. Adopt or buy a horse to take care of. Invest in its training, make it a valuable horse, and keep it healthy. If you can afford to feed a horse or pay for its training, do all you can to improve its current situation. If people who know how to train would volunteer to train some rescue horses for free, that might help make rescue horses more valuable.
Before the slaughter houses in the US closed, the kill buyers set the bottom line value for a horse. At one point, a nice fat 1300 lb horse would bring close to $1K. That was the baseline. Now, while horses are still being shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter, the costs for fuel and such have greatly lowered the value. Not to mention that people are worried about putting fuel in their vehicles, keeping their homes, and keeping their jobs. Luxuries tend to fall by the wayside, and horses are an expensive luxury. With a very limited kill market, not as many people buying due to limited funds, and people who still feel like they have to crank junk foals out because they're just so KEWWWTTTTT there is a glut of mid-lower end horses. What to do about it? For starters, people need to get their collective heads out of their butts and cut back on breeding for a while. I have some pretty decent walker mares, and they're all on vaginal vacation because I absolutely refuse to raise a foal that will not market for the stud fee I paid to get it here. I have a friend I talked to just the other day that has 20 headshe's wanting to cut down. Decent middle of the road horses, not back yard junk, and she told me to bring a big trailer and they'd fill it up. I am going to pick up a 3 year old gelding for a friend that recently lost a horse, and I'm hoping to find a home for an 8 year old mare (1/2 sister to a WGC, beautiful mare, had a stifle injury that left her sound for very limited light riding). I'm going to try to help her with the rest, but I'm not finding a lot of prospects. It's sad. And I know the anti-slaughter faction will have a cow, but I think it would be better if the slaughter houses reopened. That way there would again be somewhere to send the unwanted horses without subjecting them to days long trips to get across the border.
I know that EI has played a big part in this here in Australia. For ages people weren't allowed to take their horses off their property, and had to keep horses away from border fences. If you visited an agistment centre clothes and shoes had to be changed before visiting other horses. After a year kids had found other interests than their horses they couldn't ride anywhere, so by the time restrictions were lifted a lot of people had moved on. I didn't own a horse back then, but people tell me how bad it was.
advantageous, at a mall. It grew to alter right into a form of small ones on the escalator and that i lifted the cap to envision what ought to take place. A no longer-so-loud alarm went off and that i in the present day dropped it and went back to my family contributors. i grew to alter into 12.
