I wonder to if it starts with horses then when are cattle, sheep, pigs and such next.  What makes one animal higher and more deserving then another?  Now that I have children who love calves and the calves grow up and stay around we have a few cows that are just as big of pets as anything.  Yet when the time comes they to will go to town.  Much like horses that we use on the ranch and turn into pets being tame enough to come up to you, tame enough to be called in by yelling.  Some cultures eat horses just as we eat the animals we eat. 

In the past when we had horses that we knew we going to slaughter I'm not going to say it didn't bother me, but it also bothers me when the beef that we feed all those months goes to town to slaughter to.  But it's just part of life.

To me closing the slaughter plants in the US hasn't stopped horse slaughtering at all.   It's just made the horse market go all to hell and now they gather semi loads of horses for a long and uncomfortable ride to a kill plant in one of our neighboring coutries.  Now that's humane isn't it?