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To: nathanbedford

Here in Montana, you can still shoot and bury your horse on your own property. Some ranchers I know have a pit for their dead animals and if their horse dies they will haul it out to their pit and throw it in with the other carcasses...mainly cows. Wild animals will have it cleaned up in no time.

We, personally, have our vet dispose of them for us at $300 or so. She uses a shot to euthanize them.
She disposes of the body and will cremate them for an additional fee. We have never had cremation...just had her haul them to the landfill..to a part of the landfill designated for animal carcasses. It has been a few years since we had an animal put down so I don’t know what it costs now.

As far as why owners are abandoning their horses....high priced feed, both hay and grain. And, in our valley, skyrocketing unemployment. You can’t give horses away right now.

I don’t know anything about the regulations on this in other states. I am sure there is someone on FR that knows more about this issue than I do. If I am wrong, I know someone will correct me.


32 posted on 04/07/2009 12:18:14 AM PDT by MTMS
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To: MTMS
Thank you very much for your input.

So it seems that there is an ever widening price gap between sending a horse to the knacker and summoning a vet to euthanizing, cart off, and either bury or burn the carcass. I think they used to fetch about $.40 a pound or for horse meet at the auction, so an ordinary riding horse who went to the knacker would fetch about $400, depending on weight.

I cannot imagine that the prices gone down beyond the $300 you cite. There must be another $500 for transport and disposal. That means the spread is about $1200. The people who are losing their ranches and backyard farms to foreclosure might just not have $800 or $1000 for each horse to be disposed of. If they have two or three horses, it becomes a major concern.

Since the Liberals and the greens have driven the price of feed up because of their lunatic biofuels subsidies, keeping horses is no longer an option. The Liberals have thus destroyed the market into which to sell them. So the Liberals have created a situation of horror for the horses by squeezing a tradition about which they are utterly ignorant at both ends.

By the way, I was up at my stable the other day when the neighboring farmer drove by with a brand-new tractor and a brand-new trailer behind it. My stable owner asked, "you know how much that tractor and trailer cost?" Without waiting for my reply he volunteered, "€80,000 for the tractor 15 to 20,000 for the trailer, and he just bought a Mercedes car." The farmer did all of this by selling his grain about a mile down the road to a place where the government is making electricity. There is a surtax on every kilowatt of electric energy consumed here in Germany which goes to such madness.


34 posted on 04/07/2009 12:46:27 AM PDT by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat attack!" Bull Halsey)
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