Race horses, a staple in international trade

Race horses, a staple in international trade

Horse racing is animal cruelty, but is not relegated only to the race track and practice fields and trainer room with hormone and steroid-filled syringes.

PETA went inside Japan's largest horse slaughterhouse in early 2009 to expose a little-known fact about horse racing. When horses can no longer perform, many are sent to slaughter.

Beyond the race track, the breeding farm, the jockey...prize-winning horses are shipped to Japan for slaughter every year, where they live the last few weeks of their life in fear, constant anxiety, cold, neglect, only to then face the stench of death and heartless strangers just waiting to kill and dismember them. That is the TRUE American race horse industry.

Would bonnet-wearing, julip-sipping spectators buy tickets to this?

PETA undercover investigators have recorded exclusive footage in a Japanese horse slaughterhouse, in which 4,500 horses are killed and cut up each year—many of them racehorses—to be made into food for dogs and humans.

Slaughterhouses such as the Kumamoto Shokuniku Center, which was exposed by investigators, are often the last stop in a system that routinely produces tens of thousands of "surplus" thoroughbreds each year because there is no plan for what to do with them after their racing or breeding days are over.

All these horses want is to live freely and be with each other.