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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
U.S. horses are meeting gruesome ends abroad, while the debate rages on: Are horses 1,500 pounds of food or friend?
AP Photo/Nate Jenkins
Horses are ushered into an auction ring in Rushville, Neb. Many of them will be sold and slaughtered abroad for meat.
Jun 30, 2009 |
On the dusty outskirts of this border city, neighbored by truck stops and desert scrub, hundreds of horses mill around a sprawling grid of pens at the Rio Grand Classic horse auction. Inside the metal sale barn, a cowboy rides a handsome palomino into the show ring, and the auctioneer's chant crescendos as the price rises into the thousands. But the bidding on some horses is less enthusiastic. These horses -- plump young pintos, old red roans, a scrawny mare and her wobbly-legged foal -- dart around the show ring nervously before selling for a few hundred dollars or less. Then they're shuffled into the "kill pen," a set of crowded corrals at the edge of the auction property. There, all but the foal are marked with green U.S. Department of Agriculture tags that designate horses bought for slaughter, most likely in Mexico, where the meat is consumed and sold abroad.
Not many people realize slaughtering horses for meat has been big business in the U.S. for generations. Yet in recent decades, public sentiment, matched by state and local laws, has risen against the practice, and in 2007 the last three U.S. horse slaughterhouses were shuttered. Since 2005, Congress has also withheld U.S. Department of Agriculture funding for horse-meat inspections to prevent new abattoirs from opening in states where horse slaughter is still legal. No federal law, though, forbids U.S. horses from being sent to slaughterhouses across the border. Which is exactly what has been happening in the two years since horse slaughter stopped here. The number killed in Canada and Mexico doubled to 49,000 in 2007 and rose to more than 72,000 last year, according to trade data.
Sending horses to slaughter in Mexico and Canada has had grisly consequences. They are hauled in crowded trailers as far as 1,000 miles from auctions and feedlots to abattoirs across the border. Many end up in unregulated slaughterhouses, where they are sometimes paralyzed with knife stabs in their backs, leaving them conscious as their throats are slit.
Canadian and Mexican slaughterhouses, which export meat to Europe, are supposed to uphold horse-welfare standards similar to U.S. rules. Those mandate that horses be stunned -- rendered unconscious, typically with a captive-bolt gun, which jabs a rod into a horse's brain -- before they are killed. But many horses face a crueler fate over the border. Nicholas Dodman, a Tufts University veterinary behaviorist, says some Canadian slaughterhouses break every rule in the book. He says videos taken by an animal-welfare group and secret cameras in a Canadian abattoir show horses watching other horses being killed, a downed horse being beaten and some horses left conscious when killed.
Even more disturbing to Dodman and others is what happens in Mexico, where many horses wind up in unregulated municipal and rural slaughterhouses, which sell horse meat to local citizens. Aline Schunemann-Hofer de Aluja, a veterinary pathologist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, says conditions in these facilities can be "horrid." Hammers and small knives called puntillas are sometimes used to stun horses, she says. The Humane Society of the United States and San Antonio Express-News have reported that in a Juarez slaughterhouse, workers repeatedly jabbed puntillas into horses' spines. That only paralyzes horses, which remain conscious and able to feel pain as they're hung up and bled to death.
"The treatment of these animals is absolutely unspeakable," says Schunemann-Hofer. "But if you see the poverty of the people that live in these areas, it doesn't surprise you very much that they are not that concerned about the welfare of animals."
This spring, a bipartisan Senate bill joined an identical one in the House to stop the export of horses for slaughter and permanently ban horse slaughter in all states. (Currently both bills are being considered in congressional committees.) But a slaughter ban, backed by the Humane Society of the United States, and countless horse advocates, faces opposition from many livestock and horse-industry groups, including the American Veterinary Medical Association and American Quarter Horse Association. They say a ban skirts the bigger problem of dealing with America's abundance of unwanted horses, which number well over 100,000 a year. The slaughter industry, they maintain, offers a humane and economical way to dispose of horses.
Today the U.S. is home to over 9 million horses. Each can live 30 to 40 years, weigh anywhere from 500 to 1,500 pounds, and cost a couple thousand dollars a year to keep. Temple Grandin, a Colorado State University humane-slaughter expert, explains that many horses earn their keep by doing jobs -- on ranches, farms, racetracks, in rodeos and show rings. Horses often become debilitated or too old to do these jobs, and some horses may prove too ill-tempered or unable to do the job their owner wants in the first place. "Not many people that use horses for riding can afford to keep a horse they can't ride," Grandin says.
When horses reach the end of their lives or usefulness -- or become unaffordable or impractical to keep -- owners face a dilemma. They may be able to place their horse with a rescue group or new home. Or they may have to choose between paying a vet to euthanize the horse, shooting the horse themselves or selling the horse for slaughter.
Even then, disposing of such a large animal's body poses a quandary. Grandin explains a horse corpse can be buried, cremated, composted or sent to a rendering plant or landfill. But these options may cost anywhere from $75 to $2,000, and in some places are illegal or unavailable. Grandin and others say that slaughter offers another affordable disposal option. Not only that, as author Jane Smiley recently wrote for the New York Times, "Horse slaughter makes use of horse corpses."
Horse meat is eaten in France, Belgium, Italy, Japan and many other countries. Most every part of a horse is used: hides for leather; intestines for sausage casings; tails for paint brushes; hooves for glue. Historically horse byproducts went into pet food in the U.S.; even now, several zoos here import horse meat to feed their lions and tigers.
That's why, to some, allowing half-ton horse bodies to go to waste seems absurd. "Why not let those horses have some final use? That's the whole point of agriculture," says Preston Fowlkes, who runs a cattle company in Marfa, Texas.
Horse slaughter makes sense for other reasons to people in the livestock industry. Mike O'Connor runs a cattle business in Marfa and Sanderson, Texas. He says horses, expensive to keep, are part of his capital. When a horse becomes unusable, owners can get a return on their investment by selling the horse for slaughter. "Slaughter's a significant part of their salvage value, just like it is with an old cow," he says. "That's an important part of our business."
By giving horses salvage value, horse slaughter keeps a floor on the horse market, explains Steve Friskup. He manages a quarterly horse sale in Clovis, N.M., where 5 to 8 percent of the 400 to 500 horses at each auction go to slaughter. Since the U.S. slaughterhouses closed in 2007, Friskup says values on lower-end horses -- those selling for less than $400 -- have dropped by half. He says the closures made that lower-end market less competitive, and the expense of shipping horses across the border has narrowed profit margins for slaughter dealers.
Beyond economics, many in the livestock industry believe the federal government has no business banning horse slaughter. "If people want to eat horse meat, let them eat horse meat," O'Connor says. "I don't think we ought to get into legislating food out of people's mouths."
"I'll tell you what," Friskup says, "the real question is whether these horses are livestock or pets. Right now they're livestock. And they're personal property. So by golly a man ought to be able to do what he wants with them."
