For some, an October 30 story in the Los Angeles Times was saddening news. Many missed it, though they were engaged in a continuing discussion about horses. Few missed the same story in Monday’s Washington Post.
Yet that “news” was not news. It too reported that “protected” wild horses – 1,793 of them – were purchased by Colorado rancher Tom Davis. He sent them to Mexican slaughter houses. He’d been doing this for some time. But he had told the Bureau of Land Management he was “adopting” the animals for “good homes.”
Davis was actually trucking them to Mexico to be slaughtered. The meat was shipped to Europe and Asia, places with an appetite for horse meat.
Earlier exchanges here on treatment of horses issued from a report of rustlers stealing a Mexican friend’s livestock. “As we raced after the cuarteros, I shouted to him not shoot the thieves but the horses.” Some readers were appalled at that article. But he was a good shot; if he’d hit one of the cuarteros it meant police and politicos: Trouble and little chance of judicial logic. Luckily, the rustlers broke off into the mountain brush. We quickly rounded up the stock.
When I was tyke learning the ways living on a series of ranches in the Great Plains, dealing with stock was something everyone learned early –just as soon a they could hoist themselves onto the back of a horse. Far back in the countryside, some folks, widow women, still drove buggies.
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