This week Anna sat down with Theresa Demarest and Katherine Gregory to talk about Throw Away Horses, a new documentary on Amazon Prime and on Vimeo worldwide. Theresa is the filmmaker (she made Keiko: The Untold Story before this); Katherine runs Colorado Horse Rescue, a roughly two-million-dollar-a-year operation in Longmont, Colorado.

The film looks at how horses in the US move through what is effectively a disposal pipeline. Livestock auctions where they're tagged next to cattle and pigs. Kill buyers who double or sometimes triple their asking price by leveraging the heartstrings of horse-loving members of the public. Onward shipment to slaughterhouses in Mexico, or, in the case of Canadian-sourced horses, flown packed into planes to Japan to be sold as sashimi. Babies, often.

Two structural points underwrite the whole picture. In the US, horses are classified as livestock, not companion animals. There is no federal minimum standard of care for a privately owned horse, and state law varies.

The instinct to look away

It may be tempting as a British equestrian, to say: well, that isn't us. Most of our horses are worth more alive than dead. We don't have that pipeline.

Where is our equivalent?

Katherine described a culture where horses are bought as starter animals, ridden until the rider outgrows them, traded in for something better. The first horse moved on when the second one is found. The competition horse that stops scoring and is quietly listed. The livery horse that develops a problem and changes owners three times in eighteen months. All of it runs on the same underlying logic: that the horse is a useful object whose value lasts as long as its function does.

Throw Away Horses is, on the surface, a film about an American supply chain. Underneath, it's about a way of seeing animals that isn't particularly American. The same frame produces the kill pen and the upgrade. Different country, different scale, same idea.

Smaller in scale than the US picture, certainly. But the UK is the eighth largest horse meat exporter in Europe, ninety-nine per cent of it sent abroad. The pipeline is here. It just runs more quietly, and we look away more skilfully.

The motorcycle and the animal

Theresa keeps returning to one contrast in the interview: the horse as motorcycle versus the horse as a living, communicating animal. Stick a key in, get on, go. She says she made the film for non-horse people. The thing she didn't expect was that experienced owners keep telling her they learned something from it.

The film is on Amazon Prime in the US and on Vimeo worldwide. Theresa was clear she'd be glad to support UK community screenings to benefit rescues here. If you run a yard, a rescue, or a screening room and the idea catches you, it's worth getting in touch with her, and let us know we'd love to hear about UK screenings.