Dead Meat vs. Healthy Determination

One day Jill chatted with a real tough looking guy on the subway. He had this dog with a metal, mean looking muzzle on it. She wondered if the dog had attacked another one or what, to warrant such a vicious looking hunk of equipment. She had seen a pit bull go mental and basically eat a screeching black lab in the middle of traffic; Also, another of her dog friends was attacked by a pit bull and ran bleeding and quaking and yelping into her (previously his) house to escape; he was never the same and hated all other dogs from that day forward.  One of one her best hacking buddies around then was Koya, whose recovery from a similar traumatizing pit bull attack, Jill could admire, because that dog learned to just stand in fear, and wait out potential risk with other dogs, not lash out, or run.

The lunkhead interrupted her reverie with an answer to her question “It’s the law, man. Only in Canada I tell you. I don’t want no $5,000 fine so this is what I got to do to my harmless little puppy. It’s the owners, I tell ya.”
*
The image of the man beating on the donkey to get it to move was stuck in her mind.  A donkey will stay put til it feels safe so everything the guy was doing was not only cruel, but completely ineffective.  How could she make a difference?

She was listening to the horse-meat discussion on the CBC, and there were very good points raised.  Jill thought if you were gonna eat meat, then why waste horses?  Or even dogs and cats. Given the world's overpopulation and the starvation of many animals, including humans, maybe it was right to thin the herd rather than keeping everything alive for all time out of kindness...

Of course you might not want to consume the retired racehorses for the legal and illegal substances they were possibly full of, including bute.  That probably went for school horses and work horses then.  But what about the mustangs?

America has a slaughter ban, which meant other kinds of cruelty in Jill's mind.  Meanwhile, on the air there were reports of how ineffective processes on kill floor were in Canada for equines, because they are so different from other animals...

It made Jill so upset to think about she didn't even want to go to the barn.  But, what to do, what to do, what to do...

*
The horse tried to run out and the student prevented that, but the beast stopped, spooking at the jump... The rider almost came off but regained her seat. "Okay good," said the instructor in that split second. Then nearly screeching at the impressionable teenager, Jill added "Now, ride like a banshee! Go on!! go!"

It was probably the wrong word, but the rider seemed to know what she meant and used her seat and pushed the horse up in front of her leg and they leapt the obstacle from a standstill.   The instructor was jumping up and down in the middle of the arena, cheering, and the fellow students joined in the applause too, drowning out the sound of the pats the rider gave her mount's neck, ha.