Some of these horses are bought for a tens of thousands, although a rarity.
The chuckwagons do create a market, but remove the chucks and the market is gone. There's enough of these horses so you're just destining a horse (maybe not quite the same horse) to the slaughter for every chuck horse you would 'save' by banning the sport. The point is no horse is ever bred specifically for the chuckwagons, they are failed or retired racetrack horses.
Here's chuckwagon champ Sutherland, obviously biased, speaking on Friday about it:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens...pede-1.5209651
Quote:
One horse I bought [was] a three-year-old — who was, by the way, destined for slaughter out of a Vancouver racetrack — and they begged me to take him. And I did take him for $300 at the time. And he is currently retired at 26 in the pasture.
So that horse has been 23 years at my place. So, as you can understand, there's a tremendous bond with a driver competitor and his livestock. Because they are the athletes that can put you on stage, win you the money. They do exceptional amounts of things for you. So any time that there's a fatality, it's rocked the whole community.
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Quote:
Well, there's no doubt about it. Currently, there's 20,000 thoroughbreds thereabout in North America that are foaled each year. Half of them end up in the slaughterhouses. And the chuckwagon industry, currently there's about 100 drivers and they have about 30 horses — so there's about 3,000 chuckwagon horses at all times.
If you eradicate the sport, then there will be 3,000 more of these thoroughbreds that are destined for slaughter because there's absolutely no other alternative for these horses.
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