Don't forget the suffering horses
Our equine friends still have it rough
We don’t farm horses by the billions for food. We don’t grind up baby horses in large incinerators. We don’t keep them in tiny crates their whole lives. Thus, they are not a huge concern for EA animal welfare types. This is totally reasonable.
I still think it makes sense to shine a light on how horses are being mistreated in the modern world. Maybe there’s something to the idea of rallying around creatures that most people have a natural affinity toward. If we can one day create ironclad global norms against horse cruelty, we can check them off the list forever, then move on to less loved creatures.
I know I’m naive and sentimental, but this feels possible. We’re not asking people to love insects or fish or anything too weird. We’re talking about horses!
Horses are the beautiful, intelligent, friendly giants that have helped humanity for thousands of years. They’ve plowed our fields, transported us by the billions, and built our cities. They are near-universally appreciated. They have done their service for us, and it’s time to let them live in peace.
Which is why it’s a major bummer that so many bad things are still happening to them, a lot of which I didn’t know about until recently.
We routinely round up and kill wild horses
Until a couple years ago, I thought wild horses were the stuff of old cowboy movies. I’d never seen one, and it’s not like horse viewing is a trendy thing I would have come across, like whale watching.
To my delight, I learned these majestic creatures still run wild in the American west. To my horror, I also learned that we have government programs to hunt them from the land and sky.
In a typical year, federal workers can remove 20,000 wild horses from their natural habitat. These removals are not a peaceful process. Here’s a typical headline from a 2024 roundup: Wild Horse Roundup Ends with 42 Deaths, Accusations from Advocacy Groups.
It’s common for foals to die in the process, despite tremendous efforts by the parents to protect them. There are videos of mothers trying to keep their babies by their side throughout the process that are equal parts uplifting and depressing.
I won’t sit here and pretend like I can steelman the “it’s good to kill wild horses form time to time” position. I understand hard choices have to be made while managing wild animals. Maybe this is all for a greater good.
From what I can tell though, it seems like the ‘greater good’ in this case boils down to the fact that rounding up the horses gives ranchers more room to graze livestock.
Whatever the case, it just doesn’t seem like harassing and killing these symbols of American freedom, these icons of the West, is being done with much tact. I can’t imagine the average person would be thrilled to know that their taxes are being put to use in this way. No one has ever said, “I work hard to fund local schools, roads, and of course the use of helicopters to scare wild horses into holding pens so they can be shipped to Canada and turned into Horseburgers.”
Our aggressive, taxpayer funded, horse management activities go directly against the spirit of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which aimed to protect horses from “capture, branding, harassment, and death.”
A shocking amount of horses get eaten
About 5 million horses are slaughtered for food every year worldwide.
It’s illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption in America. But that doesn’t stop us from taking horses we no longer have use for and shipping them just over the border to Mexico and Canada to be killed for food.
According to Animal Equality:
From 2001 to 2020, the US sent over 1.6 million horses to slaughter outside its borders. In 2021 alone, 24,000 horses were sent to Mexico and Canada for slaughter.
We are also fond of shipping them directly to Japan for slaughter, a long journey that is about as awful as you’d expect it to be.
The horse factory farms have all the problems we see at any other factory farm, including lack of medical care, improper stunning before slaughter, and using painful methods to herd the animals.
A recent We Animals investigation at a horse slaughterhouse in Indonesia provides haunting visuals that are not for the feint of heart.
I’m no saint here. I ate some horse meat while on an overseas trip 10 years ago, in the pre-vegan days. It was ordered for the table, I was drunk, and I tried it. I feel bad about that, and I hope we’ll get to a place soon where, for at least this one type of creature, we can say enough is enough.
We abuse horses at the racetrack
Seabiscuit is one of my favorite of all time. That could be why I never thought of horse racing as being problematic until recently. Unfortunately, it’s kind of a horror show.
One study showed that 2,000 American horses are killed every year due to the racing industry.
It can be easy to gloss over a headline talking about a dead racehorse without fully grasping what is going on. This section of an opinion piece by an anti-racing advocate sums it up nicely:
To be clear, death at the track is neither clean nor tranquil. Death at the track can come from cardiovascular collapse, or a failed heart, from animals that are mostly still in adolescence. Death at the track can be caused by pulmonary hemorrhage, or bleeding out from the lungs, blunt-force head trauma from collisions with other horses or the track itself. Dead racehorses can have broken necks, severed spines, ruptured ligaments and shattered legs. Sometimes skin is the only thing keeping the limb attached to the rest of the horse’s body.
Here are just a few other things racing horses endure in order to satisfy our unquenchable thirst for watching them run in a circle really fast:
They are intensively trained starting at the way too early age 18 months, causing numerous orthopedic ailments down the line
They are kept isloated in 12x12 stalls for up to 23 hours a day, a cruel thing to do to such a a social animal
When their usefulness as a racer is over, they are sold to slaughterhouses. 57,000 thoroughbreds were shipped to slaughterhouses in Mexico in 2019. It’s not just the losers that suffer this fate. The winner of the 1986 Kentucky Derby likely died in a slaughterhouse.
Horse racing is still a massive industry, so it’s going to be a while before anything is done here. That said, looking at what happened with Greyhound racing makes me optimistic.
Greyhound racing used to be a massive industry in the US. It took in 3.5 billion dollars of bets in 1991. That number has plunged as more and more states outlawed greyhound racing, thanks to the tireless work of activists who brought to light all the same welfare concerns that plague horse racing.
Now there are just two racetracks, both in West Virginia. The total amount gambled is down to 350 million per year. The “sport” is on it’s way out. With luck and determination, the same thing can happen to horse racing.
If you want to watch and gamble on ‘roided out athletes running around a field and putting their lives at risk in a highly entertaining fashion, you’ve got plenty of other options.
We use horse drawn carriages
Americans have cars, bikes scooters, Uber, Lyft, Waymo, and a zillion other ways to get around a city. Yet tourists in big cities can still take a horse drawn carriage, for that romantic feeling of cosplaying that they live in the good ol’ pre-penicillin days.
The owners of these cab horses are out to make a buck, and they don’t have to comply with the animal welfare act. The horse is simply property. What could possibly go wrong?
Stories of abuse and neglect are everywhere in this industry.
I recently read the hit book Black Beauty (yes, it was a hit in 1877, I’m behind the times.) While corny and dated in parts, it’s honestly really moving. Large parts of it deal with the life of a cab horse, and how they were brutally driven to exhaustion, day after day. It caused an uproar at the time and was instrumental in getting updated animal cruelty laws passed. Maybe we need a new Black Beauty, because too many modern carriage horses are suffering in the same ways as those gilded age horses 150 years ago.
The octopuses give us hope
Us humans, in our infinite capacity to take a good thing and turn it ugly, have recently started creating Octopus farms.
Animal welfare people the world over were horrified at this development. Octopuses are super smart, so the idea of confining them in little bathtubs and raising them for food stoked indignation.
Washington and California took a stand and banned the practice. This is a great sign that there is a limit to what people will put up with when it comes to making animals suffer. All we need to do is widen that circle of compassion just a little bit. Let the same rays of empathy and compassion shine down on the noble horse. No, we don’t factory farm them for food. But we do all the terrible things talked about above, and I didn’t even get into the business of using them at the rodeo.
All that to a creature that has done nothing but be a loyal and industrious companion since the dawn of time.
Horses are not as smart as octopuses, nor do they have a recent hit Netflix documentary to call their own. But they can become best friends with a dog, which is more than an octopus can say. Really, what more do we need to know?
Absolutely banger review of Dominion.