On the verge of an accidentLATE on Christmas Eve in 2012, a young man was fatally injured in a car accident while driving home to see his family. Thomas Allen was neither drunk nor distracted by his phone; instead, he had ploughed into one of five horses that had wandered onto the road at Sproughton, in Suffolk. The horses had come loose after being left to graze on nearby land without the permission of the landowner, a practice known as “fly-grazing”.
Ten or more incidents of fly-grazing horses getting loose had been reported locally before the accident, the coroner noted. Since then, the problem has grown: animal-welfare charities and rural groups reported last year that “on a conservative estimate” at least 3,000 horses were being fly-grazed in England.
Over-breeding and the collapse of the horse market are behind the problem. The recession, exacerbated by a scandal in 2013 when it emerged that some supermarkets had been mislabelling horsemeat as beef, led to a drop in demand for horses. Ponies have since been sold for as little as £5 ($8) in some markets. A horse can cost up to £100 a week to look...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, Foals rush in
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