ForumGarden

This guy offers the classic example of changing the problem when there is no solution. IE: legalizing drugs will lower our prison costs and make fewer cirminals..

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... ml?cnn=yes

I had an idea this was happening. Even if you were able to bury them

somewhere, a horse is such a large animal it takes a backhoe to do.

Years and years ago, when we had a couple of very old horses pass

(or be put down due to age and infirmity) my dad called the small

zoo near us, and so those horses went to feed the big cats. We were

still very sad that we lost them, but somehow the thought of their

bodies feeding other animals helped.



It's really bad. I'm seeing good horses in the paper for a few hundred

dollars that should go for a few thousand. I just talked to my good

friend in the Sierras that I ride with occasionally, she just was GIVEN

a sound, well trained thouroughbred mare, registered and papers

number matches the lip tattoo. She rode her and it is a GOOD horse.

She also said it cost her $195 to fill up her truck, and they don't get

very good gas mileage while hauling a trailer. The proce of hay through

the roof... it all adds up.

I wish somebody did have a better solution that letting these things

starve to death.

RedGlitter;879051 wrote: This guy offers the classic example of changing the problem when there is no solution. IE: legalizing drugs will lower our prison costs and make fewer cirminals..How else can problems be approached?

Back at the height of the First World War there were twenty million horses in France and there was a horse shortage. If you put twenty million horses in France today they'd be a problem. The people who make new horses should be aware of the extent of the need, presumably, and not make more than can be put to use.

As for coping with the fact that all living things get old and need care and eventually they're dead and need suitable disposal, of course there are alternatives to turning horses loose into the desert to starve and decompose. People aren't turned loose into the desert to starve and decompose, after all. There are laws which place the responsibility for handling the remains of dead people when they've no family. They're treated as a liability of the local community and either interred or cremated decently because the laws recognise that people have at least minimal rights in that area. There's your solution staring you in the face - extend those minimal rights to horses, have horse cemeteries and horse crematoria on the same basis as you have them for people.

The alternative is to make the disposal of old horses commercially profitable - what those in the industry refer to as pet food. Animal protest groups decided that's not acceptable? They'll have to push for burial and cremation rights then, won't they.