Not long after that, the Tilting town council passed a similar animal bylaw. Then the people of Tilting really had no choice. They tried to keep their animals in a community pasture away from both towns. Joe says somehow the horses always wandered back. They were hard-working animals, but they weren't really tame. There were several hundred ponies on Fogo Island at that time. Families used to have two or three ponies each. They kept them as pets and as work animals. In the end most people had their ponies killed. They couldn't afford to pay fines and they couldn't afford to fence them in. Some of the ponies were taken off Fogo Island and sold.

That was in 1988. Today there are very few animals on Fogo Island. There aren't even many dogs. In 1995 the number of Newfoundland ponies left in Tilting was one.

Joe Dwyer isn't angry at Charles Decker anymore. He knows he was just doing his job. But what a shame it all was. People could really use their ponies today. They are a lot cheaper to look after and use than ATVs or snowmobiles. Newfoundland ponies eat what they find in the fields. They have shaggy winter coats so they stay outside most of the time. They can work for hours in the woods. The ponies can haul twice their own weight for most of their lives. They are smart and friendly.

Charles Decker is still sorry he had to round the animals up. He says the Joe Batt's Arm council was new at it's job. It wanted to make an impression. If the council could have known how it would all end, he wonders if they would have passed the animal bylaw at all.

There aren't many Newfoundland ponies left anywhere in the province. In the 1970s and 1980s the province began to incorporate towns and villages in rural Newfoundland. Many of the new town councils passed animal bylaws like those on Fogo Island. Most people could not afford to fence in their ponies. So they sold them to the "meat men". These men bought the ponies for as little as fifty dollars or even for a case of beer. They drove the animals to the mainland on transport trucks and then sold them in the European meat market. Pony meat is popular in Belgium and France. At the turn of the 20th century there were as many as 10,000 Newfoundland ponies in the province. By 1992 there were only about 200 left.