Re-post worthy article and VIDEO from USA TODAY.

FORNEY, Texas — Mike McBarron stepped out of the 96-degree heat and into a shed on his feedlot after loading 37 horses onto a truck. They were headed to Mexico, where they would be slaughtered and shipped around the world for human consumption.

“It’s just a job to me,” McBarron told USA TODAY Sports. “I mean, I don’t attach myself to them. I don’t fall in love with them.”

McBarron, 48, is one of the country’s most prolific “kill buyers,” people who buy horses and sell them to slaughterhouses. They also represent an uncomfortable reality for the horse racing industry.

Over the past decade, an average of more than 600 thoroughbreds a year have died because of racing, according to research by the USA TODAY Network.

By contrast, an estimated 7,500 thoroughbreds a year are slaughtered for human consumption, according to Alex Waldrop, president of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA).

“The problem is that the entire industry is a conveyor belt for slaughter,’’ said John Holland, president of the Equine Welfare Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the slaughter of American horses. “They just keep cranking them (out).’’

McBarron, who acknowledged he has bought and sold retired racehorses for slaughter, has sent tens of thousands of horses to slaughter plants and generated millions of dollars in revenue, according to invoices cited in an informal investigation conducted by a nonprofit group called Animals’ Angels.

That practice is unlikely to be a popular topic this week at the Breeders’ Cup, which has attracted many of the sport’s top horses and intense scrutiny of the sport.

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