However, at this time there is little or no enforcement of these laws, and horses in these conditions are being shipped. Humane euthanasia is readily available form a vet and can usually be done inexpensively. If a horse can be loaded into a trailer, it can be taken to a local veterinary hospital and euthanized for a pre-agreed upon nominal fee, and dropped at a render at usually no charge. If it can't make it to a trailer, it can't make it anywhere else. We don't eat our horses.
Slaughter is a betrayal of our horses.
Nothing about the slaughter of a horse is humane, nor can it be regulated into being humane. Horses deserve and are entitled to a swift painless death. The bottom line is that the slaughter of California horses for human comsumption is doing us no favor, it has and is depleting us of our inexpensive riding horses as well as many good horses. It has driven up prices, and made it increasingly harder to find good usable horses, and it it is depriving us of the revenue that these horses would have generated for the the state, either by their use or humane death.