Around here they do exactly that. Older horses are donated to cat sanctuaries where they are killed, dismembered and fed to the big cats. The same people who were screaming to shut down all the horse kill facilities are now the ones asking our government to open them back up.
I was raised on a cattle ranch and older horses are not kept until they die. They eat too much to do that. Our horses are well taken care of but they, like our stock dogs, are very much tools of our trade.
We need humane horse kill facilities here. When they shut them down they didn't stop killing horses they just shipped them over the Mexican or Canadian border and slaughtered them anyway.
Reality here in the non city world is very different than what you learn from Disney.
My post was a (not so clever) reference to the Scandinavian Zoo thread where it was reported that a Giraffe was slaughtered in front of a (admittedly urban) crowd and then the meat fed to other zoo residents. It wasn’t so much what they did as how they went about it.