# Horse Training **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 11, 2009, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024 "2009-05-11T14:06:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/21 "2009-05-12T14:16:01Z")
Does she give \*any \*supporting documentation? Unless I see some, I’m not going to be able to believe that 40% isn’t some number she’s just pulling completely out of her ass. 67% of all statistics are made up, you know. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/22 "2009-05-12T15:12:05Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > Does she give \*any \*supporting documentation? Unless I see some, I’m not going to be able to believe that 40% isn’t some number she’s just pulling completely out of her ass. > > 67% of all statistics are made up, you know. 😛 I don’t think we can say any more about the veracity of the claim until we know what the claim actually was – anyone willing to provide a quote? BTW are we talking about the Temple Grandin Book, “Animals Make Us Human” or some other book? ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/23 "2009-05-12T15:45:46Z")
Sorry, my net was down for most of a day. Thank you all for your thoughtful replies. No, she does not give any cite for her figure. I suspect she is wrong. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/24 "2009-05-12T16:37:00Z")
[QUOTE=AskNott] …However, a horse may be taken to a local butcher for processing if the meat goes back to the customer who brought it in. That’s not sale. Many lame horses become food for humans, right here in the US. [/QUOTE] > [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > Do you actually have any stats to back that up? It seems kind of a jump to go from “a horse may be butchered on behalf of a customer” to “lots of people eat their own lame horses,” given that there’s not a big tradition of horse as a people-food animal in the U.S. I’d think it would be just as likely for people to be squicked out by the idea. [QUOTE=Hello Again] Are you saying that it is a common practice in the United States for an individual to eat the meat of a horse that they personally owned? That it is a common practice in the U.S. to eat horse meat from any source? [/QUOTE] You both have leaped a bit from what I wrote to what you are asking. There are weekly horse auctions, where every kind of horse is sold. The ones that are lame or dangerous are identified as such. Most of the doomed horses are bought by agents of the major horsemeat houses. A few, though, are bought by individuals who just buy one. Those few are likely headed to a small meat house which will dispatch and butcher the horse for the guy who brought it in. I did not say that anybody eats a horse that he knew and rode. I think that’s unlikely. However, an owner who takes a lame horse to auction surely knows the horse will be killed and disassembled before long. **Hello Again** asks if I say it’s “common” for people in the US to eat horsemeat. “Common” is a stretchy word. I said, “Many lame horses become food for humans, right here in the US.” In the state of Indiana, I’d say between 50 and 100 horses a year are bought to be butchered and eaten locally. In my city-boy view, 50-100 a year is “many.” In these hard times, the practice may have increased. Horse ownership is seen as a luxury for many, so horse prices have fallen. A freezer full of horsemeat is cheaper than a freezer full of beef or pork. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/25 "2009-05-12T16:39:31Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > Also, ex-racing thoroughbreds, assuming they aren’t crippled, retain some value both as riding horses (when I took lessons at a stable as a young woman one of the horses I rode was an ex-racer) and for breeding purposes (for polo ponies or to quarter horses) even if they weren’t big winners. Quarter horses are intrinsically less valuable and common as dirt. Unfortunately, they are all too often treated like dirt either through ignorance or malice. My daughter’s first horse was a failed racehorse which she trained as a hunter/jumper. We actually made a profit on her, which we of course sank into another horse. > [@](#): > > Horses eat enormous amounts of food - the stable I used to take lessons at had acquired a number of horses from the Humane Society, which had wound up there after ignorant people bought them and failed to feed them sufficiently. My wallet and I know that very well. Did you know that horses in Alaska are wintered in the lower 48, since it is cheaper to transport them than to feed them? > [@](#): > > Personally, I think in some cases it would be kinder to slaughter unwanted horses in a humane manner than to allow them to be subjected to neglect and/or abuse. I really do love horses, but unlike most Americans, I don’t get the creeping willies over the notion of people eating their meat. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen directly some of the results of neglect and abuse (both from ignorance and malice) so putting an animal down isn’t the worst of all possible fates, and I don’t object to “recycling” the results any more than I object to eating cattle. That said, I wouldn’t want to eat I horse I had known personally, but then, I don’t eat my pets. The problem I see with this is creating a market for horsemeat. Not all horses are stabled, and even in the fairly built up area where my daughter rode I’ve heard of horse being stolen from fields. Not to mention the backlash from people who only see horses in Westerns. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/26 "2009-05-12T16:45:43Z")
There has recently (past 3 years) been a change in the laws regarding butchering of horses. It is now illegal to butcher horses for consumption at US plants. Before this law passed it was common to butcher horses for overseas consumption. Now the transfer of live horses to foreign butchers is too expensive for this to be economically feasible for most places. This has resulted in a glut of horses in the market. Before the law passed it was much easier to get rid of underperforming horses and the statistics have probably changed. ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/27 "2009-05-12T16:55:14Z")
> [@AskNott](#): > > **Hello Again** asks if I say it’s “common” for people in the US to eat horsemeat. “Common” is a stretchy word. I said, “Many lame horses become food for humans, right here in the US.” In the state of Indiana, I’d say between 50 and 100 horses a year are bought to be butchered and eaten locally. In my city-boy view, 50-100 a year is “many.” In these hard times, the practice may have increased. Horse ownership is seen as a luxury for many, so horse prices have fallen. A freezer full of horsemeat is cheaper than a freezer full of beef or pork. The equine population of Indiana was 160,000 as of a [2002 census](http://www.ces.purdue.edu/extmedia/ID/ID-320-W.pdf). 50-100 horses in not “many” by any reasonable interpretation of the word. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/28 "2009-05-12T17:06:29Z")
What \*\*Hello Again \*\*said. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/29 "2009-05-12T20:25:30Z")
> [@Hello\_Again](#): > > The equine population of Indiana was 160,000 as of a [2002 census](http://www.ces.purdue.edu/extmedia/ID/ID-320-W.pdf). > > 50-100 horses in not “many” by any reasonable interpretation of the word. So, perhaps you’re a big-time rancher, and 100 horses is pocket change to you. Good for you. Your own reference says, out of 34,000 horse operations, only 5% have more than 14 head. 66% of them have 4 or fewer horses. I don’t hang out at the race track, so I’m unlikely to see 30 horses in a whole year. A hundred head is a whole lot of horses to me. Each locally butchered horse means one family is eating horsemeat as its primary meat. Compared to what seems to be your disbelief that **anyone** would ever eat Trigger, that’s a big difference. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/30 "2009-05-12T21:48:36Z")
“Many” has to be looked at in the context of percentages. **AskNott** , even 100 horses out of 160k is 0.0625%. Barely more than _six-hundreths of a percent_. So yeah, that isn’t many. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/31 "2009-05-14T03:20:56Z")
> [@Shot\_From\_Guns](#): > > “Many” has to be looked at in the context of percentages. **AskNott** , even 100 horses out of 160k is 0.0625%. Barely more than _six-hundreths of a percent_. So yeah, that isn’t many. All right, I’ll accept that. Let’s look at another animal population, though. This other animal has a population of several million in this state. So, a hundred cockroaches in your kitchen certainly “isn’t that many.” Right?😛 ---
**Author:** ![Hello\_Again](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/85e7bf/32.png) [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/32 "2009-05-14T14:34:51Z")
> [@AskNott](#): > > All right, I’ll accept that. Let’s look at another animal population, though. This other animal has a population of several million in this state. So, a hundred cockroaches in your kitchen certainly “isn’t that many.” Right?😛 In a year? No, not really. I should be so lucky. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024/33 "2009-05-14T17:04:24Z")
> [@AskNott](#): > > All right, I’ll accept that. Let’s look at another animal population, though. This other animal has a population of several million in this state. So, a hundred cockroaches in your kitchen certainly “isn’t that many.” Right?😛 Bwaha. A poor comparison, but a good laugh. Part of the problem is phrasing. We didn’t say “not that many horses get slaughtered for food”–you said “many horses are slaughtered.” Similarly, “many cockroaches are in my kitchen” is different from “there are many cockroaches in my kitchen.” One indicates proportion while the other a more objective value, is what I’m trying to get at here. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/horse-training/496024.md?page=1)