Pony left in a garden

Whaaat!?
Do people seriously dump horses in the UK?
Can't they just get them put down or have them slaughtered?

Here in Australia you can ring the slaughter house man and he'll come and shoot the horse on the property and take the carcass away for about $50. Or the local hunt clubs will pick them up and do the same for hound food for free.
There's also the vet option here but it's expensive and it's then up to you to dispose of the carcass...
Or you can send them to the horse sales and get meat price per weight for them (traumatic for the horse though.)
 
Aussie yes it does happen here though not too much with the general horse owners. Using the hunt or slaughter man at home cost about £300 on average. Because of the horse meat scandal ( being sold as beef not horse) and our use of bute very few horses qualify to be eaten.

Glad to see he is doing well and when I was young I would think I was in heaven if someone dumped a pony in my garden!
 
Aussie- it’s mainly the travelling community that breed coloured cobs and fly graze them or leave them in fields.they don’t get treatment if they are ill and sometimes end up dying because of a heavy worm burden. They just get dumped on a footpath somewhere along with their other rubbish :(
 
Aussie, yes in the old days, now its almost impossible, even the zoos charge. Horse going to slaughter like cows just doesn't really happen. Getting rid of a carcass is a very expensive business indeed. It leads to people of a certain sort dumping dead and dying animals. A number are dumped in my region every week, charities are over flowing and are criticized if they destroy. Their is a huge crisis here, fields full of poor kept, poor animals.
A knackerman or fallen stock man could charge about £300
Hunts in this region now feed dried dog food not meat.
If the horse is like my boy, on bute, I am aware it will cost the best part of £1000 to destroy and dispose.
 
Yes Aussie they dump them, when they dump them the council foot the bill for removal, as these people probably haven't spent a penny on these animals since they bred them and they are usually sick, worm ridden or dying they dump them and use this like a free service without a care in the world

The one in this report was indeed very lucky to have found a young girl on-line who gave the address of her Grandma, although in the report it does say the previous owner had said if no-one took it they would put down, so maybe the person wasn't going to dump it on a footpath or by the road
 
Oh my goodness, what a sad situation.
I think having a reasonable means of destroying large animals is a must. In Australia only one or two states allow the processing of horses for human consumption and most of it gets exported overseas. In my state horse meat is pet food only. As far as I'm aware there are no restrictions on whether the horse has been medicated (bute etc) since it's only going to be pet food. Our situation isn't perfect either. There are a handful of horse auctions where old/sick/unwanted horses were traditionally sent to be bought by the slaughterhouse, but nowadays there are various "rescue groups" who go to the sales and post photos online of the poor creatures and encourage people to bid on them remotely to beat the meat price. The problem is that they often go to unknowledable homes and often end up neglected further or sent straght back to the sales the following month after the new owner finds out there was a reason why the poor thing was sent to the sales in the first place!
The recent popularity of these horse sales through various Facebook groups has actually encouraged a proliferation of "backyard breeders" who supply the sales with poorly-bred coloured youngstock, completely unhandled in the hope that they'll get a few hundred dollars each. The rescue groups play into this by encouraging people to "save" the horses from the meat man. And around we go again. It's dodgy breeders feeding a dodgy "rescue" industry.
Anyway. I am grateful that we have a cheap and easy option to euthanize horses here. I have done both a vet PTS (it was peaceful, but took a while longer than I expected, and then we had to get an earth digger in to bury the carcass 10ft underground in the backyard!) and a slaughterhouse PTS (I left the horse with a big bucket of feed, the slaughterman came and offered me the option to stay and watch if I wanted to be sure of how instant and humane the process was, but I chose not to and I drove off sobbing and came home an hour later to no sign of the horse, not even any blood!)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top