The Journey Begins At The Horse Auction
These horses began their journey to the slaughterhouse at a typical horse auction. People take their unwanted horses to these auction houses (also called livestock exchanges), unload them into feedlots in the back, and hope to collect a small check for their efforts. It’s the easy, no-hassle way to get rid of a horse.
Hopefully, legislation to ban horse slaughter will finally make it through the U.S. Congress. Until it does, the last thing anyone should do with an unwanted horse is take it to an auction house – unless you don’t care what happens to it.
Most unwanted horses suffer a tragic, fearful death in a slaughterhouse. There, confined in a “kill box” but still thrashing around, horses are rendered unconscious with a blow to the head from a device called a “captive bolt gun,” which fires a metal rod through the skull and into the brain.
In theory the captive bolt should result in immediate unconsciousness if fired accurately. In practice – with a frightened, panicky horse inside the kill box – it’s hard to expect slaughterhouse workers to always “hit the target.” In those cases the horses may still be conscious when they are hung upside down and their throats cut. Once “bled out,” the horses are dismembered and processed into packages of meat.
In 2006 more than 100,000 horses were killed in this violent way in the three slaughterhouses still operating in the U.S. Thousands more were shipped to Canada and Mexico to be slaughtered there.