This is the story of our horse, a rescue horse, Lastra Al-Aziz. On December 11, 2009 I went to the local horse auction to price donkeys as both a pet for my son and a guard animal for my goats. I had been to the horse auction before, about 12 years ago, looking at camp horses and Standardbreds. I had witnessed the horses being sold for meat, but wasn't in a position to take in a rescue at the time.
This time was different. We had a stall, we had a fenced in field, we had what we needed for, well, a donkey, but being right before Christmas, the donkeys and even the ponies were selling pretty well. Not expensive, but not cheap, either. Plus, I was "just looking". My husband didn't even know that I and the boys had gone to the auction that night. What surprised me was that some of the horses, nice, sound, good looking riding horses, were selling for ridiculously low prices. Lower than the donkeys and ponies. I thought, surely, they are no longer being sold for meat. That process had stopped, hadn't it? Plus, even if they were going for meat, they would at least be getting weighed and sold by the pound, wouldn't they? Little did I know, there was a reason why the prices were so low, so low that it didn't even matter how much the horses weighed.
To be continued...
