By now, most of you have probably heard about the 11 yearlings purchased Tuesday by a kill-buyer at a sale in Texas. Here is the original statement from the executive director of the sale’s organizer, the Texas Thoroughbred Association:
“We are aware of the online reports of horses from our yearling sale this week appearing in suspected kill pen advertisements on social media. We are infuriated and saddened to see this. For reference, we have taken steps to rule off suspected kill pen buyers from our sales grounds in recent years. At this year’s sale, this buyer who signed the tickets as ‘David O’Dwyer’ was not a suspected kill pen buyer to us, but as soon as we got wind of what may have been going on, we ejected him from the sale and he is banned from making any future purchases with us.
“Unfortunately, by the time we suspected the activity, he had purchased and…legally owned the yearlings…. We spoke to the buyer at the sale and we reached him by phone today. He claims these horses are not to be killed and that owners/breeders can buy the horses back. We are working to find a solution to this situation which is absolutely unacceptable.”
Supposedly, all 11 babies – so young, they had no names yet – have in turn been purchased (by various entities/individuals) from O’Dwyer. Here is O’Dwyer’s response:
“It is a public auction. I went down there. I wasn’t hiding anything. I gave my name. I wore this hat. It says Bowie Livestock. People knew who I was. I went in there and I bought horses. I got called out halfway through this auction, saying that they wanted to know what was going to happen with these horses. I was up front. I told them exactly what I do. I buy horses. I put them online myself. I wasn’t hiding them. They said, ‘Are they going to kill pen?’ I said, ‘I run one.’ And I offered all those horses back to them, and they didn’t take them.”
Then this:
“People get mad in the Thoroughbred industry, they all think it’s rainbows and daffodils and green grass flying over the ditches, but it’s not. There is a need, whether you like it or not, for someone like me going to these auctions. If you don’t like it, that is up to you not to like it. We’ve been getting calls in here for the last two hours, people mad at us for buying these horses. But no matter what the industry, whether it’s Thoroughbreds, Andalusians, Belgians, Arabians, they need someone like me to get rid of all the older horses, the crippled horses, the worn out horses.”
You can hate him – but at least he’s honest.
It all comes down to humans and the lack of caring, commitment and compassion. Selfishness, greed and overbreeding along with the lack of any accountability result in countless “unwanted” horses, auctions and kill buyers.
Kill buyers are “necessary” for this cycle to continue and, in turn, kill buyers enable people to dump their “unwanted”horses and walk without a backward glance.
The auctioneers are well aware they are part and parcel of the slaughter pipeline no matter how much they protest.
Fred and Joan, I saw that illustration of Ron Turcotte and Secretariat. It bugs me that people can be so obsessed that they are more than willing to distort reality in such a way.
Wanda, upon trying to find the article in the TDN about these yearlings I noticed a drawing of Ron Turcotte riding Secretariat through the pearly gates of heaven. That drawing has me crying against the cruel & truly “Crooked,Crummy,Gamboling Game” that took advantage of both of them! Ron later was not even to have handicapped parking readily available to him by CDI even though he was promised a lifetime pass at Churchill Downs! I feel equally bad about horses & people who have both been taken advantage of this business. We have been there! This lousy industry cannot disappear fast enough for us!
The real issue isn’t that someone has to “get rid of” unwanted horses. It’s that we keep breeding more horses than we can responsibly care for. The Thoroughbred industry, like so many others, glorifies constant breeding without accountability
for where those horses will end up. If we stopped overbreeding, we wouldn’t need kill buyers, we wouldn’t have overflowing auctions, and horses wouldn’t be discarded like byproducts of an industry. The solution is not to
justify the cycle, but to break it: stop breeding horses only to have them suffer when they’re no longer profitable or rideable.
He’s honest but he also sounds remorseless!
According to a TDN article, all 11 Thoroughbred yearlings are “safe” in the hands of “responsible owners”.
The next article up is about a lack of horses to fill the race card at Delaware Park on Wednesday.
The next article after that is about the “baby races” on August 30, 2025 with young and underdeveloped but HEAVILY exploited yearlings sold at the Ocala Breeders Sales breeze-up under tack sales held not that long ago. Now the die-hard horse exploiters find it entertaining to put the lives of young horses on the line on the racetrack. This exploitation is not that far removed from loading them up on a truck or trailer bound for the Mexican border or the Canadian border to the slaughterhouses.
After seeing the FOIA reports for so many years and knowing that the abuse and the killing is taking the lives of racehorses every day and every week, I find the idea of abusing horses for racing, which includes yearlings under tack, as revolting as shipping horses of all ages to slaughterhouses, but these die-hard horse abusers are proud of the way they exploit horses for racing, gambling, money, and their ego trips.
I doubt very much that the eleven yearlings are actually safe.
How heart breaking that the older horses, the crippled horses, and the worn out horses end up being thrown away by their owners to end up in kill pens, talked about like they are garbage that some creep like O’ Dwyer sees a need to “get rid of.”
Yes, you are so right about O’Dwyer being honest about what he does. It would only take a few seconds to Google search his name and/or Bowie Livestock to find out quickly that he is a horse dealer with a website and that he posts videos of the horses he offers to the public for purchase. If they are rideable, he hops up on their backs and rides them with a halter and the lead rope as the “reins” and definitely never puts a bit in their mouth in these videos online.
If only the Thoroughbred people genuinely cared about treating their horses as sentient beings instead of as a “product”, a commodity, a gambling chip and/or a breeding machine. If only the Thoroughbred groups could care more about the horses instead of their bank accounts and creating a false narrative that they care more about their horses than they actually do.