One of the arguments trotted out from time to time by proponents of horse slaughter sounds good and goes like this: Slaughter offered a viable option for keeping the domestic horse population in check; the number of horses in the United States went up when processing plants in Illinois and Texas closed and the number of horses slaughtered went down; the resulting population boom and the economic downturn worked together to increase the number of unwanted and neglected horses.

Problem is that the numbers don’t support the argument