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I've owned horses for years. I've met "kill buyers", bought from auctions, regularly visit the low end (meat) auction in my area, and do rehab work for neglected horses. I have seen much of this firsthand, and I'm in the trenches working to give at least some of these horses a second chance. The myth that horses going to slaughter are all old, sick, unsound, and useless is FALSE. The vast majority are neither old nor useless.

The argument for banning commercial slaughter in the US is not about what a dead carcass is used for. It's not against people eating meat. And it has nothing to do with a farmer putting a horse out of his misery.

Commercial horse slaughter in the United State is an entire process: from the time the horse leaves his last good him, to auction, to broker, to kill buyer, transport up to 1500+ miles, to feed lot for fattening up, to transport again, and then to the "kill room" inside the slaughterhouse. It can take literally months for a horse to go from point A to his final destination.

The trouble is that during those months the horses get absolutely no veterinary care whosoever. I encourage anyone who doubts this to check; it's hard to believe, but it's true. No pain management, no medicine, no protecting elderly horses from harassment by others in the same pen. Local law enforcement won't get involved once the horses are sold for "meat", so they refer the complaints to the USDA. The problem is that the USDA is not an animal welfare agency. The USDA's purpose is to protect the price of meat and to ensure only quality, safe meat leaves the plant headed for human consumption. In short, nobody can touch the kill buyers, feed lots, or packing plants.

Let's say you have a mare that is foundering. Instead of having her put down locally, you sell her because you were led to believe slaughter is a place horses who need to be put down should go. So you drop her off at a meat sale, where she stands around for a few hours and a broker gets her. She's loaded on a big trailer and hauled off to the broker's lot a few counties away. In a few days he gets around to sorting all his buys, and he realizes her stance isn't quite right. He doesn't call a vet. She stands there untreated. Laminitis/founder often will be a progressive, painful disease if the source of the laminitis isn't found. It results in a great deal of pain, and the horse stands in a bit of a parked-out stance.

The broker would know he couldn't try to sell the foundering mare as a riding horse,

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