wild horses

This friend, tending a colt's injury with her ribbon-winning daughter, is in the quarter horse business. But she and other breeders here tell me that horse prices are at their lowest ever. The reason is not only the high price of feed (ethanol) and gas (horse trailers), but animal activism.
Horses live 20 or so years (I think, don't know much about horses), but their breeding/working/showing lives are over much earlier. And there are always the duds. Breeders used to sell these horses to slaughterhouses for their meat—much prized in France. But in this post-PETA world, horsemeat for human consumption has been outlawed. What that means is that owners must pay vets to put the unaffordable animals down and backhoe operators to inter them. This too is expensive. So around here, many people have selected another alternative: They trailer their horses to the Mark Twain National Forest and let them loose, where they starve to death. Nice work, PETA!