I’m going to boring here, and restate, or paraphrase, what I said upthread.
If you cannot afford to support them, stop breeding. This isn’t a business for the faint of heart. The good ones still break down. I do understand people enjoying the process of raising horses, but you can’t always make a living at this. And the horses are the ones who suffer when they do not have an able advocate.
You don’t agree? Prove me wrong.
Well that was a deeply hurtful comment made about me. Horse slaughter is very upsetting to me, no matter the breed. I am sorry for the intentionally obtuse comment on my end.
I think most people here find the slaughter of horses a very upsetting reality. I know I do.
What this thread has evolved to include is , how can we work towards solving the problem?
There are differences in opinion on how to get there, but I believe we are all working toward the same end. 
I don’t disagree in a general sense. But I also don’t think the breeder solely bears the ultimate responsibility.
Breeders wouldn’t be placing their horses in other homes and careers if there wasn’t a demand from buyers. If a person is buying, selling, and owning horses, I feel like they have just as much responsibility for those horses’ welfare as the breeder. I know I don’t need to tell you this, but this isn’t like breeding show horses where you may keep them until they are broke to ride at 5 years of age… most of these racehorses are being sold as yearlings or even weanlings.
It’s an “all hands on deck” situation in my opinion. I think we have made a lot of improvement towards fostering that kind of mentality, but the work is certainly not done.
We have also cut so much of the purposeless overbreeding in TBs. It unfortunately still happens, but nowhere near the levels that existed before the Great Recession, before the tax laws changed in the 80s, etc. I just really struggle with how you can take action to prevent purposeless breeding without pushing out the small breeder or the new breeder.
I think the first thing is, we need to stop pretending that slaughter just a means to take care of the old, crippled, and otherwise unridable horses. It’s a myth that these are the majority of horses going to slaughter. Some yes, most, definitely not. That’s an issue across the board, not just with TBs.
I would also love to see recent breed specific statistics to see where action needs to be taken.
Also, and I strongly believe this to be the case for all breeds, I think the stereotyping and anthropomorphizing in our horsemanship just needs to stop. I really think TBs really suffer from this more than other breeds because a lot of people have such a poor understanding of equine behavior.
It would be nice to have the statistics.
This forum is not made up of the know nothing general public ( thus the outrage when a TB was found in a dump still wearing his racing plates) so there is no need to lecture them.
There are bad actors everywhere in all breeds. The TB industry is actually trying to make a difference. I have found that TB breeders have an excellent understanding of equine behavior. The breeders I have worked for were exceptional horse people that had a lifetime of learning and thus understanding of equine behavior. I was lucky to have them as mentors.
I don’t understand what you are saying in your last paragraph. Can you explain what you mean about stereotyping and anthropomorphism and why TBs suffer more than other breeds because of it? Are you speaking about the public, or the breeders?
I think I just disagree that we need to pat “the industry” on the back for a attempting to fix a problem they created in the first place.
No no, not breeders, I’m talking about the average horse owner and in some cases trainers. I just don’t like it when I hear people referring to their OTTB’s behavior as “crazy” or “just being an a-hole” or things along that line. Humans can be assholes just to be assholes… horses don’t do this, there’s always a reason for the behavior. I think these things get repeated too often and it negatively impacts the breed’s stereotype and therefore people’s perception of the breed.
@MorganSercu’s breakdown of the breast cancer comparison and then slaughter statistics is very well written and accurate, and I do human death certificate research in my science nonhorse other life. It is an incredibly difficult field, due to many issues including the fact that data collection is inconsistent since one is usually pulling from different datasets where the classes of variables do not overlap 100% or one has incomplete info at best.
(I too am having trouble using the quote function on my phone.)
@Equkelly I applaud your passion, and am sorry you don’t feel safe. But when you post on a public internet forum, it is important to listen when other people are trying to educate. Many of the posters were trying to explain their experience and knowledge in the TB world and set you straight, because it appears to me (arguably late to the party) that you are confusing what to include in the numerator vs denominator in your death statistics equations, and not quite fully understanding relative vs absolute risk vs competing mortality risk. Rudeness is not classy (for anybody), but when one (on this thread at least) starts being ultra defensive and emotional… well then that turns the conversation away from what I think your (and everyone’s) goals are: equine welfare, equine quality of life and a noble (or at least ethical) death.
Here is a brief explanation of absolute vs relative risk in breast cancer, although it’s honestly an imperfect comparison (see MorganSercu’s reply above) and I studied under one of the world’s leading female cancer researchers.
Here is an important methodology article to understand re competing risks in mortality (death) research, since when you (or a horse) dies your risk ends because you cannot die twice. Thus you have to remove horses who die of other causes than the type of death you’re interested in (slaughter in this case) from the pool at risk in a complicated modification of a cox regression model which is honestly almost never done because it’s easiest to be quick and dirty with statistics.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pu.12.050191.001433
Counting deaths in this way when you are only interested in one type of death avoids confounding or inflating your end result. However this statistical model gets complicated fast, and this is not something you can do on your calculator (or even may be possible if one doesn’t have data on the other ways horses die). I think it is unfair to the purity of the data to exclude other causes of death - whoever wrote that the real number to be looked at is horses shipped to slaughter is more accurate - or at least that would be how I would approach this.
It’s 2:30am here so if I mistyped something or wrote something completely wrong I trust somebody corrects my words for posterity. Thanks COTHers.
Here’s another perspective on breeding TBs…
The article appears to be geared towards people who haphazardly breed QH, Paints and grade horses than Thoroughbreds. Which is not to say that there are no irresponsible people who breed Thoroughbreds - but the TB stallion reports reflect there are not as many bred today as there were 10 - 20 years ago.
Consider though, the alternatives when you cut corners. Breeding a poorly conformed horse to a poorly conformed horse is setting up the resulting foal for a lifetime of unsoundness, discomfort, changing homes, neglect, or slaughter. Breeding genetic diseases like HYPP, PSSM, or LWOS is purely avoidable heartbreak. Tests for these things exist – use them rather than breed them on. Breeding just to breed fills the auctions with $20 run-through young horses that go straight to Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses.
Breeding without a plan for the resulting foal is irresponsible in today’s world. There are enough good minded horses already here that can go to trail, be a family pet, or play around on obstacles. You don’t need to breed a Pintappwalkquarab to do that. You’re not creating market desire or a designer breed, you’re putting together a whole lot of incompatible parts that just don’t fit right.
Takeaways?
Don’t breed without a plan.
Don’t breed unless you have the money to properly care for mare and foal. It’s a much greater investment than just a stud fee.
Genetic test BOTH PARENTS.
@Caligirl83 - You are too kind! I know it is super-hard to sift through the data to neither over- or understate the rate of breast cancer. Or equine slaughter.
While I agree in a general sense that labeling them as “crazy” is not productive, I do think that keeping in mind that the breed is designed and bred to be bloody should not go ignored. In general of course. There are always the exceptions. But the breed is a reactive one (in general). It’s bred into them. In experienced hands it’s not a bad thing. In inexperienced hands it can spell disaster.
If someone came to me and said “I’m looking for my first horse, what about a thoroughbred?” my first gut reaction would be no. Yes, yes, I know there are tons that are totally beginner safe, but there are tons that aren’t. There are tons that didn’t get a good restart after their track career, too. It would have to be on a case by case basis, and my guess is that a lot more TBs would flunk the beginner safe test than other, non bloody breeds.
I can’t find the source for Equine Welfare Alliance’s statement. Also, they were willing to estimate how many Thoroughbreds went to slaughter in 2016, but I can’t find where they give a percentage for Quarter Horses. If someone can find that information for 2016, then plug it into the stated number of living Quarter Horses at the time (3.10 million), then we can compare the percentages.
Unless my math is wrong, in 2016, approximately 1.6279% of all Thoroughbreds alive at the time went to slaughter.
Also, if you go to this page and take a look at the table - the number of horses that were slaughtered has fluctuated through time.
USDA Market News Livestock Export Summary reported that 53,947 horses were shipped from the United States to Mexico for slaughter in 2019.
Two-thirds of horses set to slaughter are quarter horses
Source: PETA
Okay, let’s work with that. In 2016, 114,091 horses were sent to slaughter. Let’s say 65% are QT (a bit less than 2/3). That is 74,159 QH.
74,159/3,100,000 = 0.0239
0.0239 x 100 = 2.39%
This thread is about racing and TBs. Fair enough. But why is the statistically significant difference in slaughter rates between horses presumed to be Thoroughbreds (or known) not to be discussed versus QH or presumed Quarter Horses? EqKelly mentioned that the 1% of TBs slaughtered was too low (and it was but I don’t know what percentage she thought were slaughtered annually) and as I recall wasn’t interested in discussing the percentage of QHs that are slaughtered.
Yes, they are a more numerous breed. And if we agree on some of the numbers gathered and used, they were probably slaughtered at a higher rate than TB’s. Or they were in 2016.
I doubt it makes much of an impact in the final tally, but the AQHA will happily take the money to register just about anything that has a registered QH in its pedigree.
I didn’t know that! Thanks for the info. I’ll try to remember in the future.
Most of these people were on my ignore list long before this, so I don’t need to “be educated” by people who are known and established toxic Internet bullies. COTH is great for learning about some things but IMO usually misses the mark when it comes to ethics/ welfare issues in the horse world.
No, it’s not.
Using your breast cancer example: if you divide the total number of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer this year by total number of women born this year, does that give you lifetime risk of developing breast cancer?
You realize how absolutely ridiculous that is, don’t you?
If you don’t, here’s the math:
3,747,540 babies born in the US in 2019
268,600 invasive cancer + 48,100 DCIS in 2019
We’ll go with 50% of the babies born are female–1,873,770. 316,700 cases of breast cancer in 2019. By your math, that’s 17% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer. But! lifetime risk is actually 13%! Because you can’t calculate lifetime risk by taking the number of events in one year/by the population increase in one year.
That’s what you’re doing with the TB to slaughter question. You can’t just make up math like that. Seriously, I can hear your math teacher crying from here. Did you NEVER take a statistics class?
This sort of statement, and the rest of your posts here in this thread (and pretty much the rest of the board) just make it abundantly clear you’re not here to learn at all. It’s not particularly clear why you ARE here, but by the way you keep telling us all that COTH has a reputation for being a bunch of mean girls, it’s a fair guess that you’re here because you think it’s a good place to be mean and spout off, which you certainly do with aplomb. 
Which actual ‘humane society’ are you referring to that publishes the statistics and data you are so fond of referring to?
Such a fun train wreck and no one warned me to have the boxed wine and popcorn ready
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