It's not even remotely close.
Those horses from Spruce Meadows are worth a fortune. There is no way they're loading three to four horses into a crate, saying, “Good luck, we'll see you on landing,” and wrapping the crates with ropes so no one can get into them. To me, the wrapping with the ropes allows an attendant only to kill a horse in the case of a horse trying to kick through a crate at that point. We're not talking about the same welfare for shipping horses for show compared with shipping horses for meat at this point—absolutely not.
To me, dehydration is big. We know from science that if an animal doesn't get water for 24 hours, we're going to see clinical signs of dehydration. Well, when we look at the loading of these horses from the feedlot in Alberta all the way to Japan, we're just at the limit of 28 hours. Are we assuming that all these horses took copious amounts of water and feed the minute before they were loaded? It can be four to six hours, and some prefer not to give them food and water, in order to prevent too much manure and urination from happening.
No, we're not talking about the same thing at all.