The price of putting a horse down varies; it goes up (often WAY up) as the horses are located in more urban areas.
eg, it would cost you nothing to put a horse down if you were on a ranch in the rural west. Walk the horse out to BLM land, put it down with a shot in the skull and it becomes buzzard and coyote bait.
Cost: $0.50 or less.
Urban areas: you’ll need to haul the horse away somewhere, because many urban areas will have prohibitions on burying the carcass, so you either have to haul it away live to kill & bury it somewhere else, or haul it away dead. Now things get really expensive.
True, but the cost of maintaining a horse in urban areas is also extremely high. People who can afford an extra acre of land or boarding fees at a commercial stable in an urban area, are in the luxury market. I have plenty of sympathy for their horses, but no sympathy for the people who have been living beyond their means, financing things like horses (and pools and tennis courts and expensive cars and new Italian marble floors for their latest decorating scheme) with ever higher borrowings against home equity. Plenty of these folks will let their horse suffer and starve before they trade in their 2007 BMW for a 2000 Buick. I have no problem with humane euthanasia and responsible disposal laws that get them in legal trouble for making choices like that.