Daniel Manzanares runs the livestock export pens in Santa Teresa, N.M., where almost 16,000 slaughter horses crossed into Mexico last year. He says the activists pushing for a ban don't understand how horse and companion-animal ownership differ. Wait until a scared horse kicks you in the head or shatters your femur, he says. "That's when people understand what a large animal is. We're not talking about a 2-pound Chihuahua," he says. "We're talking about a 1,200-pound animal that costs $2,000 or $3,000 a year to keep."

Because horses are so big and expensive, many insist that if slaughter is banned, more owners will abandon or neglect horses they no longer want, can use or afford. "There needs to be a way people can put them down and dispose of them that's affordable," Grandin says. "Otherwise, you're going to have neglect issues."

Without slaughter, Manzanares and others think unwanted horses will wind up like other stray animals: dumped on roadsides, starving in pastures, getting hit by cars. Some say such things are already happening. Indeed, several newspapers, including the New York Times, have reported a recent surge of abandonment and neglect cases, attributed to the recession and rising horse-care costs but also the U.S. slaughterhouse closures.

Grandin and others say slaughter, done well, is a more humane fate than abandonment or neglect. She describes how slaughter should be done: Horses are hauled a short distance to a slaughterhouse, calmly led inside and immediately stunned with an expertly placed rifle shot or captive-bolt gun. "I've seen horse slaughter done well in the U.S. and I've seen it done very badly," she says. "But if it's done here, you can control it."

Therein lies the major point of contention. Those opposed to slaughter maintain that slaughtering horses can never be humane. "They're a big part of our culture and heritage," says Liz Ross, the Animal Welfare Institute's policy advisor. "It's a betrayal to put them on a cattle truck and send them to slaughter."

Ross' organization and several animal welfare and horse-industry groups have pushed Congress to ban horse slaughter for years and are confident they'll succeed this session. Ross says horse slaughter is animal cruelty and should be criminalized. The pending slaughter-ban bills would do just that: criminalize the sale and transport of horses being slaughtered for human consumption.

Nancy Perry, the Humane Society's vice president of government affairs, explains that unlike cows, chickens and pigs, horses live and work closely with people. They're also flighty, fractious and easily frightened. These traits make them ill-suited for industrialized slaughter. Crammed into trailers for long periods, horses fight, panic and injure themselves en route to slaughterhouses, regulated or not. There they are sometimes prodded with electric goads, which terrifies animals used to being led on a halter. Then in the kill box they often frighten and slip or swing their heads. That results in many horses being stunned improperly, Perry says, so they're able to feel pain when they're shackled, hoisted and bled.

To Perry, horses blur the line between pets and livestock. But she maintains that horses -- though legally livestock -- aren't bred and raised for food in the U.S. She also questions how safe horse meat is to eat, given the routine medications and performance-enhancing drugs horses take. And while horses may be an owner's property, she says, states already have animal anti-cruelty laws. "That doesn't mean those animals aren't property. You're just not allowed to torture your dog."

Further, she insists that any proliferation of abandoned or neglected horses being reported today has nothing to do with U.S. slaughterhouses closing. She says there is no proven causal link between slaughter and abandonment and neglect. "In a poor economy, neglect cases always go up. We're seeing the same number of horses go to slaughter in Mexico and Canada as there were before here, so any change that we're seeing right now isn't related to slaughter. It's got to be the economy."

Most slaughter opponents agree there's a horse overpopulation, but Perry doesn't buy the argument that slaughter offers the necessary solution. "We do have an obvious surplus of dogs in this country," she says. "Nobody would condone shipping our dogs to Korean slaughter plants."

Perry and others also dispute that all horses being slaughtered are old or unusable. They say most are in good condition and were just unlucky when a slaughter dealer bought them. Alex Brown, an exercise rider at Canada's Woodbine Racetrack, manages a horse-welfare Web site and regularly attends auctions. He says slaughter dealers mostly bid on younger, healthy horses and contract with slaughterhouses to supply a certain number of horses. "Don't ever believe they're scooping up the horses that nobody else wants. It's a demand-driven business, " he says, that profits foreign companies selling horse meat overseas.

Victoria McCullough, an oil-company owner and competitive horsewoman in Wellington, Fla., bought almost 200 horses being sold for slaughter at an Ohio auction last year. A few were so injured or neglected they had to be euthanized, but about 90 percent were under age 7, in good condition, and have been adopted, she says.

Such slaughter-horse demographics lead her and many others to blame irresponsible breeding for the horse overpopulation. The slaughter industry, McCullough says, rewards overbreeding by providing a dumpster for breeders' surplus horses. "It's just like puppy mills," she says. "These people need to ask, 'Is there a market for this horse?'"

In fact, slaughter opponents say a slaughter ban would shrink the unwanted-horse overpopulation, as overbreeding would be curbed. And, because so many slaughter horses are in good condition, Perry says most would be easily reabsorbed into the horse market; others could go to sanctuaries and rescues or be retrained for second careers. The rest, she says, should be humanely euthanized.

Grandin believes those plans are impractical. She maintains that some owners will neglect or abandon horses if slaughter is banned. And while she agrees overbreeding may be a problem, she says that's reason to promote more-responsible ownership, not ban slaughter. "A better way to deal with the problem is to make slaughterhouses obsolete," she says, by curtailing "indiscriminate backyard breeding" and making alternatives to slaughter more affordable and widely available. She adds that banning slaughter won't stop horses from being slaughtered in Mexico because slaughter dealers will just claim the horses they're exporting are for breeding or riding. As for sanctuaries and rescues, she says many are full and financially strapped because of the recession, and there aren't enough to take the 72,000 or so horses now going to slaughter.

Perry counters that the nation's 450 rescues are always full because new horses are brought in when horses are adopted. And because so many slaughter horses would be reabsorbed into the horse market, she says only a fraction would end up in those facilities, which could be expanded to handle that influx.

Probably not Walkin' N Circles Ranch, says Anna Bowser, administrative director at the horse rescue in Edgewood, N.M. She says her facility, with 60 horses, already has tight finances and an ever-growing waiting list. Livestock-board and animal-control officers are bringing them more seized and abandoned horses, and more people, faced with feeding their horse or their kids, are giving up horses. "The trick is to find people to adopt them," she says. "It's not like owning a dog."

She shows off her newest arrivals: a mare and her days-old fuzzy foal. The mom and a filly had recently been brought in by an animal-control department, which found the horses starving and abandoned. The filly had been attacked by dogs and was nearly dead.

Bowser says her group tries to remain apolitical about slaughter. "There's no easy answer," she says. In New Mexico, where attitudes about animals are wide-ranging, taking a stance might interfere with the group's ability to help horses. "I see all animals the same way," she says. "They are our brothers and sisters on this earth. I try to treat them like I would want to be treated."

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