I should be in bed right now but I just finished watching a disturbing episode of Real Sports on HBO and now I can’t sleep. It was a second look at a story they did a year ago about what happens to racehorses when they can’t perform as well as they used to. The rest of this post, until the asterisks you’ll see further down the page, includes some descriptions of what happens — if you love animals and would rather not read it, consider this your warning and jump to the asterisks. But I think that without knowing what’s actually done, the whole issue just is not as real. The details are gruesome but relevant.

The original story showed how some horses are sold for meat, taken to horse slaughterhouses here in America. They are first stunned, and then a nailgun is used to shoot a bolt into the center of its skull, killing them. However, since horses have longer necks than cows, they move around more and it’s harder to hit the target — multiple nails are often necessary, while the horse is injured from the first. And when that doesn’t work, they get strung up by their hind legs and gutted, exsanguinated while they are still alive. Seeing it is enough to make me eat a little less meat this week, that’s for sure.

The good news is that legislators cracked down on horse slaughterhouses and now there are no more of them operating in the United States. That was the end of the original story.

This revisit shows the unintended consequences of outlawing horse slaughter in the U.S.: many of the horses that would have been taken to an American slaughterhouse are now taken instead to either Mexico or Canada, where they don’t have the same animal rights legislation we have here. The result is that the horses suffer even worse deaths than they would have here. In Mexico, some have their spinal cords severed with a knife while still alive and with no anesthesia. In Canada, some are killed the old fashioned way: shot in the head with a rifle.

More and more racetracks are instituting their own laws, so that horse owners who sell to meat brokers can be banned from their tracks, removing the financial incentive to sell a horse to recoup a few hundred dollars. And there are new programs by individual stables and horse enthusiasts designed to rehabilitate former racehorses so they can be used as event horses or trail horses, with a new lease on life.

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These private measures taken by racetracks and other organizations is a step in the right direction. I don’t know what the most effective solution is. What I do know is that sometimes when you try to fix one problem by passing a law, you create an even worse one, and this is a prime example of that. My favorite example of this concept is not as graphic but perhaps more deadly. In the U.K., emergency room patients were waiting to see a doctor for 6 or even 8 hours and people were fed up with it. Lawmakers responded by passing a new law: a patient can not spend more than 4 hours between the time he or she steps foot in the emergency room until the time that patient receives medical attention. The intention was obvious; the result less so.

After the law was passed, when ambulance drivers got a call and picked up a patient in need of medical attention, but not in a life-or-death situation, they were told by the hospital to park on the street until they receive further notice. Then when the hospital knew it wouldn’t take more than 4 hours to see the patient, they gave the ambulance clearance to bring the patient in. So instead of sitting in an emergency room, patients sat in ambulances instead. The result was lots of ambulances parked outside hospitals with people in them not getting hospital treatment, and fewer ambulances and EMTs available to actually go and pick up anyone who might be in need of critical care.

There’s another example in today’s news. In an effort to protect people from credit card companies, the government is imposing major changes in the way they do business. The basic change is to reduce the variability of interest rates, which sounds like a great thing when interest rates are rising because of credit problems in the economy (as is the current situation). But when you go from a variable rate to a fixed rate, the fixed rate is usually higher when interest rates are expected to rise, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. The result is that most of us will see higher interest rates, less availability of credit, a reduction in the grace period that one receives before finance charges start, reductions in frequent flyer miles and other bonuses, and perhaps even a return to annual fees that most of us haven’t had to pay for over a decade. At a time when credit is vitally important, what Congress is doing right now is going to shrink the supply of credit. But don’t tell that to Congress — they’re trying to help fix a problem. If it creates an even worse problem, well, that just means they get to pass another law next year…