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This Horse Was Being Sold to Slaughter. This Rescue Group Stepped In

An adult female in a dark green jacket and blue jeans interacts with a brown draft horse inside an indoor stable, surrounded by grooming equipment and hay. The setting suggests daytime natural light illuminating the wooden walls and metal bars of the stall.

A woman in a dark green jacket interacts with a draft horse inside an indoor stable at Gentle Giants Draft Horse Rescue's farm. The setting includes grooming equipment and hay, highlighting the care provided to rescued horses.

Horse slaughter is, unfortunately, still a highly profitable market. If horses can't race or pull a plow, then they often times and up at the slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouses buy 'unusable' horses at public auctions and send them off to be slaughtered.

Gentle Giants Draft Horse Rescue is often times the only thing that stands between these horses and death. These remarkable horses scrape together what money they can and go to those very same public auctions. There they bid against slaughterhouses and purchase the horses by bidding just above the meat price.

Then the horses are transported to this remarkable farm in Mount Airy, Maryland, where they can live their life surrounded by green pastures. Sometimes the horses need to be quarantined to ensure that they carry no illnesses into the herd, but after that, they allowed to run free as they might in the wild.

This group of heroes is surely worth our praise. What a wonderfully satisfying job it must be, saving these beautiful creatures.