phoenixmama said:
And another thing...it's no wonder why people are giving horses away left and right on Craigslist. I know of a local-ish goat dairy that has stray horses showing up at their place. I guess stray horses are the new stray dogs with these hay prices.
That, and the slaughter ban.. A full-grown horse used to have a rock-bottom price of like $700-$800, and what people apparently didn't realize is that the rock-bottom price was being upheld by the meat value (for lack of a better phrase) of the horse.. If a horse couldn't be sold private treaty for a pasture pal, *someone* out there would still pay $750 for it at the sale barn...either the meat buyer, or the guy bidding against the meat buyer. Nobody really ever talked about the slaughter of horses until it blew up on the news as sort of an
expos, so it was kinda like an unseen, unmentioned force at play in horse values..
When the slaughter ban went into effect, the bottom fell out because the meat buyer disappeared from the sale barn and the sale barn, ultimately, was setting horse prices.. Combine that with high hay prices and, yeah, you can't hardly *give* a run-of-the-mill horse away these days.. For a while there, it seemed like there were stories on the news about once a week of someone in the area being raked across the coals for cruelty to animals, basically on account of high hay prices, unsellable horses, and the proliferation of cell phones, "hotlines", and do-gooders who had *no clue* about the reality of the situation these horse owners found themselves in..
Some folks needed to be fined/jailed/whatever, I'm sure, but there was also a story of a lady who was brought up on cruelty charges despite the fact that she'd only recently purchased the malnutritioned horses and was feeding and caring for them to try and nurse them back.. Got busted anyway..
I'll tell ya this.. If I ended up caught in the middle of all this and wound up with a skinny horse because I couldn't sell or afford to feed, I'd be inclined to drop it off somewhere too.. Too risky to leave it in the pasture for busybodies to lament and make phone calls over..
I was paying $5 last year.
