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Despite his wide eyes and shimmering chestnut coat, horse 8778 had no takers.

With a heavy limp in his gait, the crippled sorrel was hardly worth his weight to those at the weekly Willcox Livestock Auction.

The gelding likely would be on his way to Mexico for slaughter — a journey that has become common for horses decrepit and old.

Since the closure of the three U.S. horse slaughter plants in Illinois and Texas in 2006, for violating state laws, there has been a spike in horses going across the U.S. border to Mexico for slaughter.

These cross-border journeys are often grueling, stretching for hundreds of miles with the horses crammed into double-decker trailers. For those horses arriving in Mexico each week, the deaths are potentially far more gruesome than they would have been in the United States. Some horses have been slaughtered in Mexico by repeatedly being stabbed.

More than 45,000 horses went to Mexico for slaughter last year, up from about 11,000 the year before, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

"We sell a lot of good horses here," said Sonny Shores, one of the owners of Willcox Livestock Auction. "But if they are old or unmarketable, that's their next place to go. . . . All of them in this area, most of them are going to Mexico."

Animal-rights groups have pounced on the gruesome deaths in Mexico to argue for a ban on the export of horses for slaughter. There is legislation pending in Congress to that effect.

"In a perfect world, what should have probably happened is that the law would have been passed and then the slaughterhouses would have been shut down," said Karen Pomroy, who runs Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary, a non-profit horse sanctuary in Green Valley.

But many ranchers use the gruesome deaths to argue for the need to reopen the U.S. slaughterhouses. The closures, they say, have only added to the ranks of unwanted and undervalued horses at a time when gas and hay prices have skyrocketed.

"People have no place to go with them," said Wayne Earven, a former state livestock inspector who was recently selling a horse at auction in Willcox. "To be real honest with you, we haven't seen the worst of it yet."

The road from Southern Arizona to the slaughterhouses in Mexico usually begins at auction, either in Willcox or Benson. From those points, horses are bought and then taken to El Paso and eventually across the border into Ciudad Juárez.

The horses are bought by what are known as killer buyers. The name carries a menacing tone among animal-rights groups, but to ranchers and horse traders, the killer buyer is a crucial part of the trade, keeping up values at the bottom of the market.

Ranchers say there are fewer killer buyers because the market is depressed, largely due to the price of feed and gas. A decrease in killer buyers, they say, could lead to more horses being abandoned.

"They just don't get what they used to," said Mike Robertson, who owns Robertson Horse Sales in Benson. "What used to be 70 cents a pound or so on a 1,000-pound horse — now, they might sell them for $50. That's all they are worth."

On recent visits to the auction houses in Benson and Willcox, no killer buyers could be found even though there were plenty of horses and prices were low, reflecting the depressed horse market.

But this isn't to say they don't exist.

Shores, the co-owner of the Willcox auction house, said killer buyers still come through, but he took a detached view of slaughter in Mexico.

"Some of them I'm sure go to killers," he said. "We just sell them, and they decide what to do with them."

A number of ranchers said a killer buyer from El Paso regularly attends the Willcox auction.

"Nearly every week," said Joe Chambers, describing how often horses are sold for slaughter through Willcox.

He then bristled.

"I don't sell horses to slaughter," he said. "I just can't handle it. I just, I wish I knew the words to say, but I just don't go along with it."

Nearby, Chambers' friend Herb Cook took a different view.

"I seen them kill horses in Mexico, and it's a lot cruder than in the U.S.," said Cook, a career cowboy. "I think we might as well have the work here. If they are going to be slaughtered, they might as well be slaughtered in this country."

While slaughter plants in the United States used a captive-bolt pistol to stun horses, essentially using air pressure to shoot a bolt through the horse's skull, not all plants in Mexico use that method. There have been a number of recent media reports and videos documenting slaughter by knife at a plant in Juárez. The horses were stabbed repeatedly in an attempt to sever the spinal cord.

"In Mexico, what they do is they stab the horses," said Pomroy, of the horse sanctuary Equine Voices. "What they do is they either cut a main muscle in their shoulder or in the back of their spine to paralyze them."

Pomroy and others have also been critical of the captive-bolt method, which requires restraining the horses in a particular way. If they aren't restrained properly, she said, it can take multiple times for the bolt to crack the skull.

Officials at the slaughterhouse in Juárez said this month they are now using the captive-bolt pistol. But requests to tour the plant to confirm this were denied.

About a month ago Pomroy paid $70 for a horse at the Willcox Livestock Auction — a price that reflects how depressed the killer market is at this time.

The horse, a stray that had been found just west of the Tucson Mountains, is now with another rescue group. But Pomroy had been concerned the horse would be bought for slaughter, and so she intervened.

Pomroy, along with members of a number of animal-rights groups across the country, has pushed for legislation that would outlaw the export of horses to Mexico for slaughter for human consumption and other purposes.

There are versions of the bill in the U.S. House and Senate, and Southern Arizona's Democratic representatives, Gabrielle Giffords and Raúl Grijalva, have signed on as co-sponsors.

"I knew coming in that this was going to be a controversial piece of legislation," Giffords said. "Being from Arizona, we have a long history with horses, not just as pets, but as part of the American West."

Giffords said her office is contacted by someone concerned about horse slaughter nearly every day, and the questionable conditions in Mexico coupled with the meat being sold abroad for human consumption were powerful reasons to support the legislation.

But Timothy Cordes, senior staff veterinarian for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said a ban would almost certainly do nothing to stop the movement of horses to Mexico.

"Horses are going as riders rather than as killers," he said. "A horse can cross the border as a rider, and once it's in the sworn country it can become anything at that point. There are a number of clever ways to get horses across the border."

And with a depressed horse market, where feeding a horse can cost more than $3,000 a year, many ranchers say an all-out ban will only make a bad situation worse.

"Hay prices are not going to necessarily cause people to abandon them, but it's going to cause people to be more frugal with their feed rations," said Brad Cowan, the state livestock inspector for Pima County. "The abandonment part, we've seen several horses that were stray and were suspicious in the way they turned up."

But Keith Dane, director of equine protection for the Humane Society of the United States, said the ban could work.

A number of the people auctioning off their horses don't necessarily know they are being bought for slaughter, he said. Some of the better horses could still be used on ranches, and the balance could live out their lives at horse sanctuaries like Equine Voices.

"We believe there are plenty of options for these horses," he said. "For decades the horse industry has used slaughter as a method for culling the over-breeding that they do. They basically are intentionally breeding horses that they know are going to slaughter."

As the debate plays out on Southern Arizona's ranges and on Capitol Hill, horses continue to head south.

When horse 8778 went to auction a few weeks ago, no one bid on him. There were no killer buyers at the auction. and no rancher has a use for a crippled horse. But there were also no rescue groups there bidding to take him in.

So, instead, the house took him back. There would be another auction in a week. Perhaps then the slaughter buyers would arrive to take him to his final destination.