Colt Overload

[Argent II]

The use of stallions in Spanish culture is heavily tied in with Bullfighting, which is now in decline. Arabs traditionally didn't geld their stallions, but rode mares. However, worldwide, there are more geldings than stallions. None of this helps with the situation at hand, it's just to illustrate the disparity between real life and games.

It's more a matter of status than anything else. And the modern preponderance of geldings is mostly a matter of incompetence; most people cannot or will not handle an entire animal, whether it be a horse or a dog or a cat.

Some people are happy to cull them, and at this point I have to interject that if I was a parent I would not let my child play this game for this very reason. (Happily I'm not, so - yay!)
Before you all pile in and say it's only deleting a bit of code, yes I know that's all it is, but it's the implied message that is being hammered into impressionable young minds from society as a whole, which is it's ok to just discard stuff, when it really isn't. Wouldn't it be nice to teach kids to be responsible in a fun way for a change?

Our local animal shelter had to take in pets because they "Didn't match the furniture" "We were going on holiday" "He/She is too old".
Is it too much to ask to teach people to be responsible while having fun?
Rant Over...

It is just code. It's even sugarcoated as "rehoming" whereas other sites have outright slaughter and kill buyers. I've always found this particular stance somewhere between unnerving and comical. You're overthinking it if you're applying this much value to bits of data. People who react the same way to deleting a line of code and euthanizing a living animal scare me a bit, to be honest. I jokingly refer to my mass culling of horses as feeding a small country -- the ones that aren't good enough to breed are plenty good enough to be "meat ponies." It's modelling real-life food-animal industries; unless you're some sort of vegan, I'll assume the honesty qualifies as "responsible." And if not, I'd say that shielding your metaphorical children from the realities of where their food comes from -- and how the world as a whole functions, if you're going to use a game to teach life lessons -- is irresponsible.

[Buzzsaw]

Bwahahahaha! Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick! No I'm not a vegan! Far from it actually, I was referring to the throwaway culture as a whole. I know where meat comes from, I spent some time on a farm, the animal shelter references were to show just how thoughtless some people are.
P.S. I just got another filly, it's now 11/4 to the boys.

[Kintara]

Bwahahahaha! Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick! No I'm not a vegan! Far from it actually, I was referring to the throwaway culture as a whole. I know where meat comes from, I spent some time on a farm, the animal shelter references were to show just how thoughtless some people are.
P.S. I just got another filly, it's now 11/4 to the boys.

Probabably why it's more realistic to have a kill buyer, rather than simply 'rehome'. At least it's not sugar coating what happens to the throwaways!

[MMStable]

I seem to have a filly overload at the moment with my French trotters. Out of the 11 horses I've bred, only one of them is male *headdesk*

[Xant’hippe]

Culling the herd: so far most of the ones I've rehomed (young animals with poor stats) happen to have been male. If I could choose gender, I would make most of my bred animals female.

In the US there have been some kindly-intended horse people who have adopted foals produced as a side effect of the PMU industry. (There is far less of that now that plant-based estrogens are more common.) So to soothe my over (ovary) - active conscience, I have remembered this when rehoming.

That said, I have nothing against rehoming or RL euthanasia when applicable. Anna Sewell taught me, when I was very young, that death can be a mercy for any animal who otherwise is or will be suffering. After that, it's sensible to make what use is possible of the carcass. I am donating my own corpse to medical science.

If anyone needs to get rid of an *old horse who cannot be rehomed*, see my recent messages in this topic and "Comments". I'm doing a 25 horse buy and age out starting 3/26/16, 1700 UTC. So, against Dylan Thomas' injunction, I'm helping them to go gently into that good night.

[Revenant]

Oh yeah. I'm having to rehome a lot of colts recently. Even if they're wonderful, I am down to two mares in my ACD program. o.O I need them to have fillies but they keep having colts aaaaaah. ;.;