Charity vs. Greed vs. Ethics . . . or lack thereof – how DO we save the horses? August 1, 2010

I rescued two pregnant mares last week for $400 each. This one is now $550. Do we know when we are being GOUGED? So repulsive of this kill pen owner . . .

A few years back we rescued a dozen horses from a North Dakota PMU ranch that had recently been dropped by the Premarin industry. The rancher’s family had raised horses for several generations and had started supplying urine to Wyeth Ayers maybe a decade earlier, investing in huge pee barns (don’t ask, you don’t want to know right now) and taking out big loans to make their facility current with North American Equine Rancher Association (NAERA) codes. Then they dropped them and the rancher was stuck with a lot of debt, little income and a mess of pregnant mares. We helped them out the first year, and assumed they would sell their horses off and get out of the business.

The next year, the rancher called and asked if we wanted any more of his horses as he’d bred them all again. About a hundred of them. I was appalled, and replied that we would not help him, please stop breeding, for God’s sake, there’s no market for all those babies. He said he was behind on his loans and he’d have to sell them for slaughter. I felt sorry for the horses, but I was not going to help someone who did not help himself. Months later I found out he had contacted a California rescue and convinced them to help place his horses, and every year since, he tells them the same story – help place them or he’ll send them to slaughter.

It’s easy to coerce us, because as a group, we bleeding heart animal rescuers can’t stand NOT to save the lives of these animals. BUT, in allowing ourselves to be held over a barrel and forced to become the bread and butter of breeders who don’t know when to quit (the market for foals was drying up long before the economy tanked since there are just way too many of them) we are aiding and abetting crimes perpetrated by lazy and manipulative jerks.

Last week we rescued a batch of horses from a kill pen in Tennessee. We all busted our butts to raise the funds to get them out before they shipped. In the end, there were only six horses left, not enough to make it worth sending them to the slaughter house in Canada. Somehow, this pissed off the owner of the pen, and he decided to raise the prices for the bleeding-heart-animal lovers, so horses that cost $300 to get out last week (slightly higher than the per-pound rate for the slaughter house) now cost $600. When you add in shipping, there is little hope of rescuing these beautiful animals from death, and at the end of next week he’ll sell them for the usual per-pound amount to the killer buyers.

All right everyone, raise your voices . . . can we all shout “scumbag” at the top of our lungs? And there is nothing we can do about it, except, perhaps, NOT rescue these poor horses (how bad will we feel then?) so that this creep understands we can’t be forced to our knees in the name of compassion and kindness for helpless creatures in distress. But what will it really matter to him as he will get his money anyways from the killer buyers?

 Does this make your head spin? It makes me nauseous . . .

I’m not sure what anyone can do about this. Pressuring this guy won’t matter, he’ll “punish” us by not letting us save these poor horses. If we keep paying these amounts to rescue them, there’s a good chance he’ll raise the prices even more, assuming we’re all stupid enough to pay anything to save a horse from death. The sad thing is, we can’t. It’s not only wrong to play this guy’s game, it’s unethical to allow a greedy dirt bag to grow wealthy because we care. It feeds the cycle in kinda the same way buying puppies from puppy mills perpetuates the suffering of hundreds of thousands of dogs, even though we feel we are saving a mill puppy (by paying full price for it in a pet shop, of course!)

 The only hope for the horses of this continent is for us to start an all-out campaign to stop the over breeding of every kind of horse, in the same way activists have worked so hard to do the same for cats and dogs. The difference here is that while most people put horses in the same category of sentimental value as a cat or dog, they don’t meet the same end as our smaller house pets, whose lives end with a humane injection and a pain free death. Feel free to Google how horses are slaughtered, and watch the videos if you like, but it’s not my cup of tea. Just know from the time they are packed into filthy kill pens, then stuffed into trucks and shipped four thousand miles with no food or water, then packed into slaughter yards, terrified and most often very ill . . . well, you get the drift . . .

And it’s all because there are way too many horses. WAY TOO MANY HORSES. The answer is not slaughter. The answer is education. It will takes decades to fix it, but we need to start now. Meanwhile, we are left with an age-old problem that I don’t know the answer to . . . greed. Anyone have any idea how to address that? Because I’m at a loss . . .

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