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so he'd put her aside. When that pen gets full enough, he'd send a big shipment to a kill buyer. In the meantime, as laminitis progresses it gets harder for her to walk around without pain. Aggressive herd mates pick on her. She can't get near the hay piles. Finally a week goes by and there are enough in the pen to fill a truck.

A horse who doesn't load into a meat truck is "motivated" any way they have to. Since there are no animal cruelty laws against "meat" horses, these guys do what they need to in order to get her to step on. She doesn't budge even with a whip, so she may be hit by a 2x4. She finally shuffles on, and the remaining horses are loaded.

The distance from the local dealer's lot to a kill buyer may be 300-500 miles. A common route would be to drop off a horse at a place like New Holland auction in Lancaster county, the brokers are in neighboring counties, and one of the region's big kill buyers is in central New York state. So that's about 4-5 hours for a weak, suffering horse to try to keep their balance in an overheated, crowded trailer with others pushing and shoving against her.

She's unloaded reluctantly into a "kill pen", a special pen just for horses the big buyer has written off as "meat". She may be feeling unwell at this point. She might've gotten Strangles or rhino from all the other horses around, and with the stress of the trip, she's likely to get sick. When large amounts of discharge come from her nostrils and her temperature is over 103 nobody notices. She just stands there and waits. Could it get any worse?

Finally she'd reloaded into a tractor-trailer sized truck heading right for the final stop: the slaughterhouse lot. These are regulated by the USDA, but remember the USDA is not an animal protection agency. They exist to help farmers and protect meat price & quality.

From central New York to the nearest horse slaughterhouse (Illinois) would be a good 1,000 mile drive. That's right: all horses must be shipped cross-country to either Texas or Illinois if they're sold for use as meat. 1,000 miles is a 3-4 day drive if you keep moving. Horses are not unloaded, nor does anyone look in the trailer to care for them. In the summer that's 90+ degree days of constant moving in a trailer crowded hip to hip with warm equine bodies. Maybe by the time she arrives the worse of her nasal discharge has stopped. She's still exhausted, her foundering feet hurt her, and she may arrive "downed" in the trailer.

The USDA does not allow the meat companies

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