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On the auction floor, kill buyers, as they're called, choose carefully. The price for a pound of flesh has
halved since local slaughterhouses were shut down. But while they've closed in the US, the trade continues across the
border to slaughterhouses in both Canada and Mexico, meaning horses now face days of gruelling travel to meet their end. What
used to be a short journey can now be more than 2,000km away. Dale Haley is a kill buyer. He reluctantly agrees to speak with
me.
DALE HALEY, KILL BUYER: Well they got to go - we went 300 miles before, now you go 1,400.
REPORTER: How do you work out the journey?
DALE HALEY: You don't. The expenses
are getting so high, it's just going to completely shut the whole market down.
REPORTER: Where
do you take them?
DALE HALEY: To the slaughterhouse? Saskatchewan, Canada. It's 1,400 miles.
REPORTER: When you do the maths on making it, on working it out - you have to buy a horse, you have
to transport it, you've got to get an end sale result. Is it making money?
DALE HALEY: Uh-huh.
But the margin of profit is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, to the point where it's about ready to just say no,
forget it.
REPORTER: So what happens then?
DALE HALEY: Then these horses
have no place to go. There will be no market for them. None. No place.
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