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[RC] Dealing with the over supply - kathy swigartTerry Bannister said: All that is fine, but the point of Karen's post was that poor ?husbandry was the?cause of?the excess horses, and the ?horse industries need to stop the over supply. America ?should?not continue doing the "wrong thing" by overbreeding ?in the first place.
People will stop producing horses ("overbreeding") when it becomes too
expensive to feed them, not when it becomes too expensive to kill them humanely.
An don't make the foolish mistake of thinking that creating a culture where it
is improper to slaughter useless horses will reduce the breeding of them.? One
of the unintended consequences?of fostering this culture is to have people turn
their useless work horses into breeding stock instead.
I cannot COUNT the number of people with mares who have prematurely ended their
working horse careers (usually from some permanent unsoundness, but often just
from lack of good performance ability or an unworkable temperament), who then
"retire" the mare to be bred.? I even know people who have "saved" mares from
being killed in order to put them to this use.
I will lay you odds that many of the TB horses that would have gone straight to
the killers from poor performance on the track are mares that are now being
"saved" from that end and will, instead, later have foals, probably with
equally as lackluster performance ability.
One of the reasons that so many horses have been overbred is that many people
with otherwise useless horses are using them for breeding stock.
The only way to reduce the amount of overbreeding is to reduce the number of
mares being bred (note that the number of foals produced is NOT a function of
the number of stallions being bred so castrating males has little effect on the
number of foals produced).? And one way (admittedly not the only way)?to reduce
the number of mares being bred is to kill them before they have a chance to
reproduce.
I guarantee you that when you tell mare owners, it is wrong for them to kill
their useless mare, that MANY of them will decide to breed her instead.? I know
it happens because I have seen it happen...more than once.
Fostering a culture in which it is considered wrong to kill a horse and make
use of its carcass has CONTRIBUTED to the over breeding of horses because it
leaves alive animals to be bred which otherwise would have been killed before
they could be bred.? The compulsion to use a horse that you are feeding for
SOMETHING is strong.? Far better to arrange to for it to stop needing feed than
to arrange to breed it.
kat
Orange County, Calif.
:)
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