Aging, lame horses face slaughtering for meat
The professional buyers crowd the inside rail of the tiny ring, sizing up the horses hustled past. Many dealers probably will head over to Pennsylvania on Monday, where the largest horse auction east of the Mississippi takes place in New Holland. From there, it might be on to Maryland to buy retired thoroughbreds cheap.
The auction begins with a skinny old appaloosa, so woebegone that bidding opens at $10.
"Twenty dollars, twentytwentytwenty," the auctioneer urges.
A silver-haired man nods almost imperceptibly.
"Twenty dollars. Do I hear thirty? Thirtythirtythirtythirty?"
An intense woman raises her hand. The man turns to meet the competition's gaze. They recognize each other, and there is a tacit understanding that what they are fighting over is not the life of this sorry mare, but her death.
The woman is from a rescue organization. The man sells to a slaughterhouse.
With a slight nod, the meat man lets the appaloosa go.
Horse slaughter
Now, a similar battle is about to be played out in a far bigger arena, with much higher stakes, in what may be the last roundup for a $41 million industry that most Americans don't even realize exists: the slaughter of horses for human consumption overseas.
Texas prosecutors are threatening criminal charges against the last two equine slaughterhouses in America under an obscure 1949 state agricultural statute unearthed by animal-welfare activists. Meanwhile, a bill being drafted in the U.S. Senate would make slaughtering a horse for human consumption a federal offense, even if the meat is for export only.
But even within animal-welfare circles, there are fears that victory may be bittersweet, a triumph of sentiment over reason by a society that prizes Flicka as friend, not filet.
Of an estimated 7 million-plus horses in the United States, about 50,000 end up each year in Texas slaughterhouses, where they are stunned by a four-inch retractable bolt shot into the brain, then hung up by a hind leg to have their throats slit so they can be bled out. The method, required by the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, is the same used for beef cattle. At least 20,000 additional U.S. horses are transported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. More than 3 million U.S. horses have been slaughtered for foreign markets over the past two decades.
"The problem is, what are we going to do with 70,000 unwanted horses a year? There aren't enough rescue organizations," said a horse-industry official who refused to be identified because the issue is too divisive.
"It's super, super sad," said Hillary Bogley, who bought the underweight appaloosa in Front Royal for her Middleburg (Va.) Humane Foundation. "Now they'll all go to Mexico, where we have no regulation, and the animals will suffer even more. Horse slaughter is not going to go away unless people regulate the breeding industry to stop overpopulation.
"Slaughter is just a necessary evil."
When she can afford to, and has space for them, Bogley, like other equine rescuers, will buy sick, lame, malnourished or blind horses at auction to either rehabilitate them or have a veterinarian euthanize them, with the carcass then hauled to a rendering plant for disposal. Euthanasia and rendering can cost an owner a few hundred dollars, which explains why some refer to slaughter as "the poor man's euthanasia."
Different views
Jesse Austin, a horse dealer whose business includes selling to a Canadian slaughterhouse, views it as responsible recycling.
"I go to maybe four sales a week," Austin said in Front Royal, about one hour west of Washington, D.C. Austin bought four horses for $1,865; he figured two probably would end up at the slaughterhouse.
"I see crippled horses at two or three different auctions a week, the same ones jockeying around. A lot of them are drugged and doctored up so they look good in the ring, then someone who bought them thinking they got a nice riding horse gets home and discovers that the horse is lame, or 30 years old, not 15.
"Then some kid rides him to death on the Blue Ridge, beating on him to go faster. That's cruelty."
If the horse was going to be put down anyway, Austin argued, and the method of slaughter has been federally sanctioned as humane, then why shouldn't the meat go to feed people rather than to "a big hole in the ground?"
In Fort Worth, Texas, the prosecutor leading the legal battle against horse slaughter sees it differently.
"In this country, you don't eat your dog, you don't eat your cat, and you don't eat your horse," said Ann Diamond, assistant Tarrant County district attorney.
"The status of the horse is a moral and cultural dispute," she acknowledged. "Should these animals be considered purely livestock, purely companion animals, or a combination of both?
"Remember, the killing is not illegal. What's illegal is the possession of horse meat or the sale of it for human consumption."
Diamond is quick to note that her mother is from Belgium, one of the biggest horse-meat importers, and while Diamond never has eaten horse, she said she respects the rights of other cultures to do so — as long as they're not U.S. horses.
Niche market
France, Belgium and Italy are among the most voracious consumers in Europe, where fears of "mad cow" disease and an enthusiasm for free-range over factory-raised protein make horse meat a delicacy. Raising a horse to maturity is costly, especially in Western Europe or Japan, where open space is scarce; it is cheaper to feed the niche market with imported horse meat from the United States, Mexico or South America.
Recipes posted in German on the Internet include horse-meat goulash and filets in burgundy sauce. Its proponents describe horse meat as sweet, tender and reminiscent of elk.
The Fort Worth-based Beltex slaughterhouse and the smaller Dallas Crown plant are European-owned. While the rump roasts, T-bones and sirloin steaks intended for human consumption all are shipped overseas, both companies also sell meat to U.S. zoos, whose endangered carnivores, they contend, are dependent on horse meat.
The horse's pericardium — a thin, membrane sac surrounding the heart — can be used to make human heart valves and patches used during open-heart surgery. Parts of the carcass also are sold by the slaughterhouses to make products including violin bows, art brushes, baseball covers, fertilizer and pet food.
In a lawsuit challenging Texas' right to prosecute them, the slaughterhouses argue that they are federally regulated and that cultural intolerance is the real reason they are coming under fire.
"We also slaughter wild boar, ostrich and bison, and nobody asks about them," noted Dick Koehler, manager of Beltex, which processes about 500 horses a week, most bought at out-of-state auctions. The going rate right now is 30 to 40 cents a pound, with the average horse weighing around 1,000 pounds.
Beltex and Dallas Crown said they will shut down if the lucrative human market for horse meat is closed to them, although the laws would not prevent them from continuing to slaughter horses for premium pet food or other byproducts.
Battle continues
In 1998, Californians voted by a 62 percent majority to make it a felony to sell a horse for human consumption. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., now is drafting legislation to stop the slaughter trade on a federal level, recognizing the horse's "significant role in the history and culture of our country."
"This horse meat is not used to feed starving people," Feinstein said in a written statement. "Rather, it is sold as a delicacy in Canada, Europe and Asia for almost $15 a pound."
Advocacy groups plan to hire lobbyists for the horses, which already have a political action committee called HoofPAC geared up from the California battle.
At the Beltex plant on a sunny morning this month, the pens behind the killing floor were filled with horses young and old, beautiful and bedraggled, standing or sometimes slipping and falling on the slick cobblestones beneath their feet. Beltex does not allow outside observers to witness the slaughter, or the arrival and unloading of animals from the dealer trucks.
This morning, a young gray gelding has come in, brought, plant managers say, by his weeping owner. The horse has an incurable bone deformity in a foreleg, meaning he will never be fit to ride, the owner reportedly explained. Now the horse sticks his nose through the pen rails to nuzzle one of the men preparing him for slaughter. The worker strokes his nose. Dick Koehler's cell phone rings, playing the theme from "The Lone Ranger." The meat man regards the gray horse.
"We're providing a service," he says.