I don’t have a cite for this. I got it off Jeff Teidrich’s substiack and I’m not sure where he got it:
"The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each.
A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night.
From there the mustangs disappeared. They never appeared at a public auction. The trader won’t say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter."
Like I said I’m not sure of where this came from, but apparently there is some loop hole in the protections for the Mustangs. Katy Hobbs halted the removals in at least Arizona. Aside from the absolute cruelty and evil this represents, I’d like to conspiratorially point out that this is coming around the same time trump is “importing” ground “beef” from a country that last I knew he wouldn’t name. Seems suspicious to me. We should spread that around a bit.
I’d also like to know for real where they’re taking these horses. I hate these people so much. They are not only cruel, evil, and corrupt, but they are the biggest bunch of incompetent, bumbling, stupid buffoons. It is so disgusting and embarrassing. Why must they spoil everything?
I don’t know the answer, but indiscriminent slaughter doesn’t seem to be the way to go either. And I know mustangs aren’t native, but they’ve been here longer than the US. It seems that they are as native as all of us European immigrants and imigrant descendents. Yeah, I know bad argument, but it is also true.
You know the saying don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence? With this bunch both can and are true at the same time. I wouldn’t be surprised at a return to bear and bull baiting, but could see it all going spectacularly bad, escaped bears, dead children, and the magas and the administration both loving it and blaming it on Biden or Obama.
I love horses. I had them as a girl and a young woman. These animals do not deserve this sort of inhumane and careless treatment. I think if they really wanted to solve the problem they could, but it would take attention and money. This administration is certainly not going to put money toward it.
There’s not enough wild horses caught and slaughtered to be enough “ground beef”, for this country. Trump said that he’s was importing some. He forgot that thought half a minute later.
There’s plenty beef grown for consumption in this country. It is the cost to rear them to market, power costs, vet bills. Loss if grazing land. Farmers going under.
I hate the horses are being caught and slaughtered too. The round ups are not exactly cakewalks. Cruel on all levels.
There is the issue of the horses destroying private property. It is a huge problem. They kill a significant amount of people on highways. The state governments tell people not to feed or water them, but they do anyway.
Ever lived in a neighborhood with feral cats? Well, horses are much more destructive and big. That’s big poops on the road or your driveway. Lots of pests that creep on to your pets or you.
Just to clarify: I don’t really think that horse meat from the US Mustangs is what trump is importing. However, it wouldn’t shock me at all if it was at least partly horse meat. It really sounds like something the lamebrained grifter in chief would do.
I also know the size of the herd is a problem for many reasons. There needs to be a solution orher than wholesale slaughter. I wish I had the brains, education, and talent to fix the problem.
Wild horses are ‘invasive’ in the sense that when Europeans arrived there weren’t any in America. But that’s not because the Americas were virgin wilderness, it’s because the rich and diverse ecosystems of North America which have been called “the American Serengeti” for the variety and number of megafauna species they included had been ravaged by humans. There were no horses in North America because Native Americans hunted them all to extinction a few thousand years ago, along with most of the rest of North America’s big animals.
Restoring horses (and other large mammals) to North America would greatly improve the ecosystem, not harm it.
It’s true that mustangs aren’t the same exact species as the extinct North American horse (domestic horses come from an extinct species that originated on the planes of Asia), but these horses came to Asia from America and are the closest we are going to get.
If you want to remove a feral animal, focus on feral hogs, which are far more destructive and actually compete with extant native animals for habitat, unlike horses who fill an empty niche.
The cause of the north American megafaunal extinctions have been hotly debated by scientists. Although most agree hunting was part of the reason, the so-called “Overkill Hypothesis” has been soundly disproved. It had no scientific basis, and it was mostly based on a coincidence- that Humans arrived about 10000 years ago, and so did the extinctions. However, there is no archeological evidence for the over hunting, and now we know humans arrived more like 20000-30000 years ago.
Horses no longer have enough natural predators, and the populations are expanding faster than the ecosystem can handle it in many area. The huge plains where many animals ran free are gone now,
Humans were around before the megafauna went extinct but you know what else happened before humans came to North America? Changes in climate. The megafauna survived multiple glacial and interglacial periods without all disappearing at once, until humans happened to be there hunting them during such a swing in climate.
To be clear, we should also restore those.
Partially because the megafauna is gone. The only way for one to come back is for the other to return alongside it.
Eh, raising and keeping horses is expensive and labor intensive. The option at least, to send ole Paint to the glue factory is not something we non horsey people want to contemplate, but it’s part of the calculus of making it pencil out overall. It has to be available as an option. I’d not be in favor of an arbitrage system any more than outlawing the rendering plants altogether, which is of course what some advocate for.
I don’t get what is “cruel” or “inhumane”. Every cut of meat in the local market comes from a “slaughtered” critter. It’s not like these horses are being tortured to death.
Most slaughter in the US is inhumane. But it doesn’t have to be; that is another issue no one seems to have the will to fix. Especially now. As far as the mustangs go the illegality and sneaking around the rules tends to be even more stressful to the horses. As they are trailered miles and miles without food or water many don’t make the destination alive. It’s horrifying.
My BFF’s son is a zookeeper in Kansas, and for a while, he had to go to the train station twice a week, to pick up freshly slaughtered horsemeat for the animals. It came from a place in Nebraska that does this for the zoo and wildlife rehabilitation market.
I personally wouldn’t have a problem with eating horsemeat if I knew what it was beforehand.
Actually, horsemeat does not make good burgers. Horsemeat is very lean and too dry for burgers. Steaks or roasts are better uses. As ground meat, it works best when cooked in liquid, like stews or chili.
When horses kept on your farm are so injured or old they have to be euthanized or shot, or they die naturally there’s no really easy way to bury large animals.
Giving or selling to zoos seems a cromulent way to dispose of the body. To me.
Heck zoos euthanize male giraffes to feed to the big cats. Apparently there’s way too many. Heard that on Animal planet.
This is a far cry from wild mustangs.
All animals have to eat.
(Still couldn’t make me eat horse. I like my meat to come from the grocery store with a nice purple stamp USDA)
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