If you go to a sale and personally outbid the killer buyer, you're rescuing that horse.

And while I don't deny that some horses who _could_ be useful riding horses are sent to the killers because of overstock and the owner can't be bothered (like many pony foals in the UK. There's no market for unbroken 11hh ponies, particularly ones without pedigree. *Most* horses ending up there have something wrong with them. Like chronical lameness. Or melanoma to an unmanagable degree. Or a thousand other reasons why a horse who _appears_ to be 'too good for the killers' ends up there. Some of them will come right if you are willing to invest a year and $$$ for specialist treatment - but it's a gamble. Economic collapse - like in the old Easter Block - sometimes leads to people selling off horses very cheaply; but that is much rarer.

Unless you know the horse and its history, this is a gamble - and one that killer buyers often cash in on. "Pay me $$$ or the horse gets it," is a lucrative game - they don't just want to make a profit, they want to make a *big* profit, because, y'know, the horse is a rescue, and that's worth twice as much as the horse would be on the open market, right?

Wrong. Buying horses from killer buyers _encourages_ such practices. Buying them before the killer buyers turn up is another matter; but encouraging the 'I have a field, a stallion and some mares' breeders to produce foals en masse (because they're cute and will be a tourist attraction) _regardless of the quality_ is not a good long-term strategy.

The best thing anyone did for PMU horses was to encourage the breeders to choose quality mares and quality stallions and have foals with papers; which could then find good homes. And I'm glad that the big-time industry has collapsed, even if there was a fallout, because I was concerned over the way those horses were kept.

On a personal note, I would never 'adopt' a horse, because either they want it out on loan and keep control over it *or* they want the working capital back. $$$ adoption fees at, or above the market value of the individual are the worst of all worlds for the person who pays them - they don't have control over the horse, and they pay over the odds under the impression that they're rescueing a poor horse.

The US has a setup where horses are transported over vast distances to very big killing lots and often treated badly there. I have absolutely nothing against local slaughterhouses - a bolt gun isn't inherently evil, and feeding the carcass to hounds or turning it into dogfood isn't either; and commercial owners like riding schools cannot afford not to _get_ a little money instead of spending it when the end result is a dead horse anyway - it would not be fair on the other horses that would need to work that much harder.

I object to long transports, particularly under the conditions we've seen in Europe, where horses from all over - some as far away as the Baltic states - are driven to Italy or France, often in sealed lorrys without stops or water. You can imagine horses squeezed in for fourty hours at a time, and you can imagine what state they're in when they arrive - that, indeed, is despicable.

I am also opposed to slaughtering horses for human consumption. Firstly, there's a welfare problem - you can't use many medicines, including all chemical wormers, within mamy weeks (if not months) of slaughter - so do you just not worm and treat the horse (bute is utterly forbidden in the EU - my horse had bute, he is Not Edible), or do you let harmful medication get into the food chain? And the other is that it encourages the wrong kind of people to breed the wrong kind of horse - ones that are heavy (hence worth more) but which often lack all the traits that people who want to _use_ horses are trying to breed for - longevity, good health, good conformation, athletic ability, good temperament. You can't - particularly not while rescuers abound - keep the two strands apart, and breeding for meat is not doing any breed a favour. See horses like Percherons and Ardennes which used to be not too big, not too heavy, useful allrounders, and are now often resembling HYPP positive Quarters - all bulk, no usefulness. (HYPP would be an asset to the meat industry. Think about it.)

Britain has a live export ban - you can sell your horse abroad, but not to be slaughtered in France. It hasn't stopped overpopulation entirely, but it's cut down a fair amount; so I'm all for regulating it and putting transport regulations in place - if horses have to be fed and watered and are not allowed to travel more than eight hours a day without rest, it would cut down on a lot of cruelty.