Blood Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dooley. ‘They could have made a fair bit of grade by doing that, couldn’t they? How much does an edible horse go for these days?’
    ‘Not these animals,’ said Tadhg. ‘Even if they were healthy and not pumped full of pentobarbitone. Whoever disposed of them would have had to show their passports to the meat processors, to prove that they weren’t officially excluded from the human food chain. Apart from that, there’s hardly any meat on them. So far as I can make out, they were all race-fit thoroughbreds.’
    ‘You’re codding ,’ said Detective Horgan. ‘These are all racehorses?’
    Tadhg bent down and grasped the rigid fetlock of the gelding that was lying beside him so that he could lever up its hoof and show them its shoe. ‘See that? That’s a level-grip racing plate. It’s made of aluminium to save weight. And look at this one over here.’ He held up the hoof of a horse that was so decayed that its tan-coloured hide tore like rotten sacking when he twisted its leg. ‘This one’s a front jar calk plate, aluminium again, for lightness, but with a steel toe grab inserted in it so that it gives the horse better grip in very soggy going.’
    ‘So these are not just unwanted animals from riding stables?’ Katie asked him. ‘Or sulky trotters that have run out of trot?’
    ‘Not at all,’ said Tadhg. ‘Every year in County Cork we collect over two hundred stray or injured or unwanted horses, and there’s no doubt at all that the problem’s getting worse. Ordinary middle-class folks can’t afford to keep horses for their kids any more, like they used to, and often they just drive them out to a field somewhere and abandon them. Then there’s the Travellers, like you say. They claim to love their horses but they don’t have the first idea how to look after them properly. We were trying to start a horse-training course for them but the funding was pulled.’
    ‘It’s not all down to Travellers, though, is it?’ said Katie. ‘It’s a massacre in the racing business – even for horses that don’t get thrown off cliffs.’
    ‘Well, you’re absolutely right. The sheer inhumanity of it. Too many Irish stables are still breeding a ridiculous surfeit of horses every year. I mean, they do that so that these multimillionaire owners have more of a choice of the bestest and the fastest. But that still means that hundreds of unwanted thoroughbreds are being put down. And the older horses are sent to the knacker’s, too. They might have had their moment of glory, but these days nobody can afford the expense of looking after them once they’re past it. It’s off to France to make salami.’
    He pointed to three chestnut foals, lying almost on top of each other, as if they had huddled together for protection in the last seconds of their lives.
    ‘There’s the young ones, too. Look at them. If they don’t survive forty-eight hours after they’re born, a breeder doesn’t have to pay the stud fee for having their mares covered, and some of the fees are extortionate.’
    ‘What’s the average stud fee these days?’ asked Katie.
    ‘Some studs used to be asking a quarter of a million euros as a nomination fee, but that was when things were booming. They can’t demand so much now, after the recession, but it can still be tens of thousands, and if the price of bloodstock drops sharply enough during the eleven months that it takes a foal to gestate, then that foal is pretty much doomed. It will either be aborted or else it will meet with an “accident” shortly after birth.
    ‘These days a breeder will be lucky to get a few hundred for a foal at auction, and if they can’t cover their costs, some breeders simply abandon them at the auction house. So what else are you supposed to do with them then? After one auction recently eighteen foals were sent off for slaughter. Eighteen!’
    He paused, surveying the beach with its piles of dead horses. Some of their manes and tails were waving in the wind,