A Shifting of Horse Power : Slaughterhouse Is Often a Final Home

They weren’t Amelita Donald’s horses--they had been spared--but the theft of three show-quality equines from the Dallas stables where her quarter horse is boarded sent Donald on a months-long journey last year through the often tawdry world of horse trading.

“The police wouldn’t do anything for us and neither would the sheriff,” she said. “We were told we’d have to find our own leads.”

The victims of the theft banded together and hired private investigators. Donald threw herself into the search, which took her to slaughter plants and horse auctions where she said she encountered unbelievable wretchedness.

“You see the animals in these horrible conditions in the plants, standing in manure, with cuts and bruises and broken legs, with banged-up heads and their eyeballs dangling out,” she said.

Her first impulse was to blame the animals’ condition on the slaughterhouses, where horses are killed and processed for human consumption overseas. But Donald soon learned that the suffering began before the animals reached the killing pens.

From auction to slaughter, the journey taken by more than 300,000 horses yearly in the United States is needlessly filled with suffering, according to animal-rights activists, horse lovers and Humane Society officials familiar with the issue.

Ursula Liakos, a Northern California horse breeder and activist, says thousands of horses are mistreated and many die while being transported cross-country to slaughterhouses.

Most of the horses are bought at thousands of auctions held across the country. They make the trip to slaughter in overcrowded, low-roofed, double-decker trailers built for cattle. Such conveyances are also routinely used by ranchers, but critics say rides to the far-flung slaughterhouses sometimes cover thousands of miles. Horses cannot stand for long periods in double-decker trailers without suffering gashes, critics of the system say.

Defenders of the slaughter industry say it performs a service by humanely eliminating unwanted horses that otherwise might be neglected or mistreated by their owners. But critics say many animals arrive at the slaughterhouses not only with deep cuts but so starved and dehydrated that they can hardly stand.

Because there are no slaughterhouses in California for processing horse meat for human consumption, most California horses are transported to Texas, where there are four such plants in operation.

Fourteen plants are licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to slaughter horses for human consumption. In addition to the meat sent overseas, the horses’ hides are sent to tanneries to make leather, and other body parts are used to make dog food, soap and other products.

In California, bills have been introduced in the Assembly that would regulate the transportation of horses and strengthen current laws regarding animal theft.

Only four states regulate how horses are transported, and the regulations typically are not strongly enforced, said Gayle Eisnitz, an investigator for the U.S. Humane Society in Washington, D.C.

Animal cruelty “has never been a priority” of law enforcement authorities, she said.

George Hubner, head of the veterinary paramedic program at Houston Community College and a former animal-cruelty officer with the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, agreed. In the mid-1970s he was the only animal-cruelty officer in Texas. Now he estimates that 25% of the state’s counties have animal-cruelty divisions. But he said, “It’s just hard to get an agency to prosecute (cruelty to) cattle and horses.”

For many Americans who have traditionally thought of horses as work or pleasure animals, or even as pets, the idea of eating horse flesh is unthinkable. But it has long been a mealtime staple in France as well as other European countries such as Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, and it has also caught on in Japan.

Europeans developed a taste for horse flesh during adverse times, such as during and after World War II, when other meat was scarce, said Dr. Robert Ragland, a slaughter specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They continue to eat it now because it is trendy, he said.

“Also, there are some who argue it is better for you and that it is easier to digest than beef or pork,” said Ragland, who added that he has seen no studies that substantiate such claims.

Because of shortages of horses in Europe, the United States today supplies much of the horse flesh consumed overseas. Demand is so great that suppliers receive at a minimum twice as much for equine meat as for beef, Ragland said.

Still, many American horse lovers remain staunchly opposed to the trade in horse flesh.

“A horse wasn’t meant to be eaten,” said Bob Gilliland, a horse breeder whose ranch is near the newly opened Archway Packing Co. in Desloge, Mo.

“They were used in starting this country up, to work and then for transportation. And they’re too hard to raise, too expensive to raise, to be slaughtered for human consumption. They’ve already killed the horses off in France. We’re going to be without horses here too in the next few years.”

Ragland himself once worked in a horse slaughter plant in Tennessee and is a defender of humane slaughter. He acknowledged, however, that slaughter operations in the United States tend to move around a lot, in part because they deplete the number of available horses in a given area rather quickly and then move on to another part of the country.

In fiscal 1990, the number of horses that were slaughtered and passed inspection for human consumption was 315,192, according to USDA Slaughter Inspection Office figures. Another 80,000 horses are trucked to Canada yearly for slaughter there, say Humane Society officials.

Last year, about 55,000 tons of processed horse meat valued at $155.8 million were exported from the United States, according to USDA Foreign Export Office.

Ragland said the figures have remained about the same for more than a decade, except for a brief period in the mid-1980s when the European Community Commission temporarily banned the import of horses from the United States after they were found to contain parasites.

On March 27, the ECC again issued a two-month ban after horse meat from the United States was found to be infected with trichinosis. The ECC, in cooperation with the USDA, recently began inspection tours of U.S. horse meat plants, an ECC spokeswoman said recently.

One of the plants on the inspection tour is Archway in Desloge. Although the French-owned slaughter plant is only 5 months old, it already has had myriad problems. Last month, the owner of a company that hauled waste from the plant was fined for discharging blood from the slaughter plant into a creek that fed into Big River. Residents complained of the water “running red with blood.” Also last month, three people were arrested and charged with stealing horses and selling them to the slaughter plant.

Area residents opposed to the plant held protests and demonstrations to try to block it and continue to accuse the plant of unsanitary conditions and spoiling the environment.

The plant was forced to shut down temporarily on April 5 because of the European ban.

Robert Brewer, deputy director of the USDA’s slaughter division, said inspectors work full time at every plant that processes meat for human consumption, inspecting every animal individually before and after slaughter.

Tests to determine whether potentially harmful drugs or chemicals are in the animals are done only on a random basis, he said. He acknowledged that since horses, unlike cattle or swine, are not specifically raised for slaughter and are brought to packing plants from numerous sources, random testing renders a less than definitive measure.

He said, though, that the larger slaughterhouses keep horses on hand for days before slaughtering them, which allows drugs to leave their systems. Critics claim, however, that the Archway plant slaughters horses immediately after unloading them.

Officials of the plant did not return telephone calls, but in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in February, John Cross, the general manager, said, “We run a clean plant.”

To critics of the horse slaughter industry, he added: “I say if you don’t think it’s proper to use horses for meat, then don’t buy it. The good Lord put horses here to be used, and they aren’t born with saddles on their backs. But we put a saddle on them, a bit, a cinch, spurs--that’s what we do to horses, and that isn’t necessarily humane.”

Statistics on horse theft are hard to come by, but slaughter critics say the unceasing demand for horses has made it a chronic problem across the country.

Liakos, the Northern California breeder and activist, says horse theft is so prevalent that her Penngrove, Calif., organization, the Coalition Against the Slaughter Horse Industry, has created the Hanging Tree Committee, a network of activists across the country who try to track down stolen horses before they can be slaughtered.

“In the olden times you had hanging trees for horse thieves,” she said. “We can’t hang them anymore, but we can look for the stolen horses.”

But most horses that end up in slaughterhouses are purchased through legitimate public auctions, both slaughterhouse owners and their critics say.

One Southern California stable owner who buys horses for slaughterhouses said he goes to auctions at least twice a week, buying 300 to 400 horses a month; the slaughterhouses pay anywhere from $200 to $600 per horse, depending on its size.

“It’s a business like anything else,” he said.

The buyer, who asked that his name not be used, denies that many “quality” horses bought by the slaughterhouse buyers end up being slaughtered: “If you’ve got a market to sell him for more money, you sell him for more money. We try all the time to make sure we get anything good out of there.”

He acknowledged, however, that a lot of “old pets” wind up going to slaughter. “It is kind of a shame,” he said, but “a lot of these things are better off dead. They’re starved and poorly taken care of.”