“Animals are my passion. Animals are my life … Animals are my reason for being,” Jennifer Raymond told me as we stood in the shade of an outbuilding at the Mad River Stables in Arcata at the tail end of the recent heat wave. Raymond founded the Humboldt Spay/Neuter Network and her enthusiasm for animals is infectious. Her latest foray into saving her four-legged friends is grazing a stone’s throw away in a bright green pasture dotted with yellow flowers. Her name is Glory Be, and she is a pinto mustang that Raymond purchased for $15 dollars at a Bureau of Land Management horse sale in Burns, Ore., last year. The horse was headed to a buyer in the Midwest, she says, along with 49 other over-10-year-old mustangs. “That just [made] me really nervous,” she said. “What does anybody want with 50 over-10-year old mustangs?” And so Glory Be ended up in a field on the North Coast rather than on a charcuterie plate somewhere in France.
Another thing that’s turning 10 this year is California’s ban on horse slaughter. In 1998 the Prohibition of Horse Slaughter and Sale of Horsemeat for Human Consumption Act passed into law with the largest percentage of votes (60 percent) of any California animal protection initiative. But over the past decade the ban has caused unintended damage to California’s and by extension Humboldt’s equine economy, by lowering the price of horses. Before, horses always had a minimum per-pound value. Now, with the market flooded with animals that would have ended up in a slaughterhouse 10 years ago, supply is outstripping demand and that’s hurting horse breeders’ bottom line.
Raymond admits that there’s an inherent irony with a society that condones the consumption of cattle and other livestock but makes an exception for horses. “If I were a meat eater,” she said, “I’d say it’s really hypocritical of me to condemn slaughtering horses for food when we slaughter cows and sheep.” But Raymond, who taught vegetarian cooking for 20 years, is not an omnivore. “I personally don’t want to take any animal’s life for my food source,” she said.
For Raymond, like for many Californians, horses are an indelible symbol of the American West. And they occupy a fuzzy region between pets and livestock: not as compact as a dog, but equally loveable. And certainly not intended for human consumption. “People have this mental and emotional attachment to horses,” Richard W. Wilcke, director of the University of Louisville’s Equine Industry Program, told me recently from his office in Kentucky. “And you combine that with the fact that we have a long standing cultural taboo not to eat horse meat.” What you get is legislation like California’s, and the recent closure of America’s last remaining horse abattoirs in Texas and Illinois. But horse slaughter isn’t going to go away — the $26 million dollar a year business has merely moved away. Horses are now shipped out of the country to Canada and Mexico, where the USDA doesn’t control what methods — humane or not — are used to slaughter them.
A white paper prepared for the Animal Welfare Council in 2006 by almost a dozen Ph.D.s, including economists and veterinarians from the country’s leading Ag schools, addresses the unintended consequences of banning horse slaughter. The paper argues that if the 1 percent of America’s horses that usually end up going to slaughter are kept alive, not only will that increase the population of unwanted and neglected horses, but it will also lower horse sale prices in general and increase the strain on horse rescue facilities — both of which are already happening locally.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon at the Humboldt Auction Yard, Lee Mora presided over his cowboy-boot-and-cowboy-hat-clad flock of local ranchers. Ascending prices cascaded off his tongue effortlessly. Cows lowed and spun in the central corral. The cool air in the windowless interior of the auction yard was a fragrant mix of manure and mulch, with sweet undertones of grain feed. There was only one thing missing: horses.
But that’s nothing new. Mora hasn’t sold horses at his auction for about a decade. He says he stopped after California passed legislation banning horse slaughter because he knew that most of the animals he sold were headed into the food chain. Mora insists that the sale of cull horses — those destined for slaughter — didn’t provide significant revenue for the auction; rather it was a service he provided to his clientele — mostly cattlemen — when they needed to get rid of unwanted horses. The auction, he says, served as a “facilitator … to our producers to turn these horses over humanely, and they would go through the meat supply — much more humane than the situation we have now.” Other Northern California auctions, who continue to sell horses, aren’t as punctilious.
NorCal Equine Rescue, which claims to be the largest non-profit horse rescue group in California, based in Oroville, has rescued over 500 horses since it was founded in 2003. Tawnee Preisner, who founded the organization with her husband, told me in a recent phone interview that at the last livestock auction she attended in the Central Valley she counted seven killer buyers in the stands. She says that even though it’s illegal to sell horses by the pound in California, killer buyers purchase horses by the head at a price that works out to as much as 50 cents per pound. “The law is there but they don’t care,” she says of the auction yards and the buyers. As for the California Department of Food and Agricultural, the agency you’d think would be in charge of enforcing the horse slaughter ban, all they do, according to an agency spokesperson, is inspect state-licensed slaughter facilities to ensure they’re not processing horses.
In fact, it’s hard to put a finger on who exactly is in charge of enforcing the ban. Brand inspectors in Oregon and California say they don’t check horses being transported northward across the border. East of here, in Fallon, Nev., and up north in Hermiston, Ore., pound horses are being sold at auction regardless of whether they originate in the Golden State, and later transported to foreign slaughterhouses. At present, groups opposed to horse slaughter are lobbying for federal legislation that would make transporting horses for the purposes of slaughter illegal, but such a law doesn’t exist yet.
Preisner admits that the ban on horse slaughter in California has affected horse breeders by lowering the overall price of horses sold at auction, but she explains that “in the long run it’s going to be better for the horses and the horse market.” Better for the horses because fewer animals will end up slaughtered, and better for the horse market because eventually, after the number of horse breeders is reduced, the equine economy will balance itself out again. (Many of the agricultural economists I spoke to for this article agreed that in the long run the ban on horse slaughter will translate into fewer horses, but at the cost of horse-related jobs.)
The extra strain on horse breeders is one of the reasons why Preisner thinks there ought to be an economical option for disposing unwanted and/or injured horses. Now it costs about $500 to have a horse put down and hauled away, according to a local veterinarian. Three or four years ago, the local tallow plant charged much less to come and pick up a horse for processing, but they’ve since gone out of business. Preisner suggests creating government-subsidized euthanasia clinics.
Lee Mora bristles at the thought of the government getting involved in the horse business. He’d rather leave things up to market forces. But with a ban on slaughter, the market is already not as free as it used to be. That’s because slaughter provided a natural, cost-effective mechanism for culling unwanted horses from the herd.
“Horse people are reluctant to try horses anymore because there is no bottom,” Mora said over the phone early one recent morning. “Not only is there no value to them, you have to dispose of them yourself. Because of that, the whole horse market has crashed.”
The Animal Welfare Council white paper estimates that eliminating the possibility of selling a horse for processing decreases the value of horses in general by approximately $304 per head. But local ranchers say it’s even worse than that. In many cases, horses are being given away or simply dumped in a field somewhere. Or they end up in a horse rescue like the one Sara Isaacson runs.
Isaacson started the Heart of the Redwoods Horse Rescue group in Humboldt in 2003. But she rescued her first horse from slaughter in 1998: Sonny was still grazing somewhere in a nearby pasture when we spoke over the phone recently. Isaacson recognizes that there has been a major shift in Humboldt’s equine economy, but she attributes it less to the ban on slaughter and more to the rising costs of alfalfa hay (up more than 50 percent per ton from last year) and diesel fuel.
“I don’t think the ban on slaughter has been the key issue,” she said. “I think the cost of keeping the horse has been the key issue.”
For that reason, Heart of the Redwoods emphasizes educating potential horse buyers about the real costs of raising and breeding horses before they end up abandoning them for financial reasons. As it is, there are too many abandoned and neglected horses for Isaacson to take care of. The recent seizure of 40 neglected horses in Myers Flat has “totally depleted us,” she said.
Isaacson predicts that in the future there are going to be a lot fewer horses in Humboldt County. “I think that people will come to realize that buying a horse for their daughter is not a quick fix,” she said. “I think you’re going to find more facilities that are leased facilities, where you can come and take a lesson or ride on a trail. That’s what you see in San Francisco.”
Admittedly, it also means that some old-time ranchers will find themselves out of a job. “For so many ranchers, their profit margin is so small that they’ve really had to look at horses and their usability,” she said.
Ray Christie is a hard guy to get a hold of. With almost 2,000 acres spread around Humboldt County and livestock ranging from poultry to cattle to miniature horses, he’s always busy taking care of something. Lucky for him, he doesn’t depend on horses for his livelihood. If that were the case, he says he’d be out of a job. Instead, Christie makes his money buying and selling cattle.
“If I had to buy hay for [all] these horses, I’d go broke,” he told me on a recent weekend. The two of us were standing beside his huge, red Dodge truck. In a field just across the road, over 50 head of horses grazed blissfully unaware of the state of Humboldt’s equine economy: gray, sorrel, dun, black. You name it, Christie’s got it.
The burly, mustachioed rancher told me that almost a dozen of the horses out in the pasture had been dumped there by people who, he assumes, couldn’t afford them anymore. Every once in a while, he’ll come out and notice new additions. Since he doesn’t have to pay for feed, he can keep as many as the field can sustain. And the horses, it turns out, have proven unexpectedly useful. The pasture wasn’t always this nice, he said. The horses have eaten back the tussock grass, and they even nibble on the willow branches. They’ve made it so that he can run his cattle here, and that’s good for business. But the connection between his swelling herd and the decline in the local horse economy is undeniable, and, according to Christie, it all leads back to the ban on horse slaughter.
“The horse market has definitely been impacted,” he said. A decade ago the killer market kept the prices of regular working horses higher, he told me. “It was nothing to get over $1,000 for a killer horse.” And now? “Free,” he said. “That’s how bad it is.”
Christie also thinks it’s helped to push up the price of horse hay. He figures that with the increase in the number of horses (due to more unwanted and neglected horses) the demand for feed has gone up, which has led to hay shortages and higher prices. The problem has been compounded by the rising cost of fuel.
From the perspective of a livestock breeder, Christie sees another deleterious consequence of the ban: “What the rescue place is doing is they’re taking a lot of these horses that are inferior, that have something wrong with them, and adopting them out,” he said. “Well, a lot of these guys are going to breed them, if they’re mares, and they’re going to get inferiors foals.” Slaughter, on the other hand, allowed horse breeders to cull out the biters and kickers, as Christie put it.
As for the old-time horseman, Christie worries his days are numbered: Once upon a time “he could take a young $500 horse and break it and turn around and sell that thing for anywhere from $1,000 all the way up to $4,000 depending on what the horse was. Now you can’t do that. And if the horse didn’t turn out the way he wanted, at least he had the alternative of sending that thing to kill. Now if it don’t turn out, [he’s] stuck. [He] has to pay $500 to have the thing put down.”
Unfortunately,it’s hard to calculate the exact financial impact the ban has had. The Humboldt County agricultural commissioner doesn’t include horse production data in its crop report, which does, for example, include data on cattle. The Farm Bureau doesn’t collect information about the county’s horses either.
“There are just so few data available on the so-called horse economy,” James Leiby, associate professor of economics, told me recently from his office at the University of Maine. Leiby’s research was once focused on the equine economy, but there just wasn’t enough data out there for him to work with.
What little information we do have is compiled by the American Horse Council. According to their last report, released in 2005, California’s horse industry produced goods and services valued at $4.1 billion. The number of Californians involved in that industry, from owners to veterinarians, was 311,100, and there were more than twice that many horses (698,000) in the state. As for the number of full-time jobs the industry provided, the AHC estimated that number to be over 50,000.
But for the most part, people who are paying attention to horses are concerned with the racehorse industry. “No one is looking into the economics of ranchers and their horses,” economist James Ahern of Cal Poly told me recently. Ahern coauthored the Animal Welfare Council white paper. He explained the way the equine economy has been affected by the slaughter ban in purely economic terms, saying that if a horse is an asset you have to ask yourself “What’s its scrap value?” By banning slaughter, horses essentially lost their scrap value.
Ahern’s ability to analyze the situation dispassionately contrasts sharply with Jennifer Raymond’s animal enthusiasm. During the writing of this article, her horse Glory Be gave birth to a foal, Freedom. It’s ironic that someone who has devoted so much of her life to spaying and neutering cats and dogs unknowingly adopted a pregnant mustang from the BLM — and the irony is not lost on Raymond — but she couldn’t be happier about how things have turned out. She saved two horses instead of one.
Though Raymond would like to see an end to the slaughter of all American horses across the borders in Canada and Mexico, she says, “There are only so many things I can save in the world and I’m having to pick and choose these days.” For now, she’s focusing her energy on the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro program, which she considers to be inefficiently run, and which, according to her, doesn’t always act in the best interest of what she considers to be one of the West’s greatest treasures — its wild horses. The BLM spends $38.8 million on wild horses and burros annually. About half of that goes to maintaining short- and long-term facilities for the animals. Raymond hopes to see horses like Glory Be, who are over 10 years old, protected from killer buyers. She suggests returning to an adoption-only procedure, which is what the BLM already does for its younger horses. If you buy a horse you have to keep it for a year and the BLM checks up on the animal, which makes selling it for slaughter economically unfeasible. Raymond would also like the BLM to gather fewer horses so as to lower facilities costs, and to use birth control to keep its wild herd population down.
When it comes to the local horse population, people on both sides of the slaughter issue seem to agree on one thing: A reduction in the number of local horses would help. How to make that happen is the contentious part. For those opposed to slaughter, a drastic reduction in the number of horse breeders seems to be the best answer. But that leaves ranchers scratching their heads, wondering why things can’t go back to the way they were when selling unwanted horses by the pound was an easy, unregulated way to keep populations down and prices up. It also helped maintain local jobs, which — as an unintended consequence of the now decade-long ban on horse slaughter — may end up meeting the same fate California’s unwanted horses once did.
This article appears in Ends Meet.
Humbolt’s equine economy and horse slaughter in California.
This article is more balanced than most on horse slaughter but there are glaring errors.
The statement “But over the past decade the ban has caused unintended damage to California’s and by extension Humboldt’s equine economy, by lowering the price of horses. Before, horses always had a minimum per-pound value. Now, with the market flooded with animals that would have ended up in a slaughterhouse 10 years ago, supply is outstripping demand and that’s hurting horse breeders’ bottom line”
is absolutely false. Although it is true that California passed a law banning horse slaughter in 1998, killer buyers are alive and well in California and transport horses out of California weekly to horse slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. Read today’s TB Friends journal [June 5, 2008] at http://www.tbfriends.com. There are horse killers who live in Vallejo, Wilton and surrounding communities in Northern California for the sole purpose of buying cheap horses, selling and transporting these horses to slaughter in Canada and Mexico. These kill buyers buy horses everywhere and take advantage of any person who is financially strapped by getting these horses for free or buying them for a small amount of money. A couple of weeks ago, a killer buyer bought seven horses in Woodland California for $40 a piece and sold them to slaughter.
It clearly doesn’t matter whether California passed the law banning horse slaughter, horses are transported out of California at least once a week and sent to the slaughterhouses in Canada. Why don’t you reporters investigate horse killers in California who are breaking the law by selling horses to slaughter?
The horse market and horse slaughter.
The next statement is another statement meant to deceive: “Lee Mora bristles at the thought of the government getting involved in the horse business. He’d rather leave things up to market forces. But with a ban on slaughter, the market is already not as free as it used to be. That’s because slaughter provided a natural, cost-effective mechanism for culling unwanted horses from the herd.”
What does this mean: “slaughter provided a natural, cost-effective mechanism for culling unwanted horses from the herd?”
Hasn’t this person heard of castration for his stallions? If you can’t sell horses, don’t breed them? This is a very simple conclusion if you take the time to figure out the problem.
Moreover, according to the FDA, the number of horses going to slaughter in the US when the slaughterhouses were operating represented about 1% of the total number of horses in the country. Does that sound like an unmanageable problem? This guy is just another pro-slaughter advocate who wants to get as much money as he can out of the horses he overbreeds and wants to “cull” from his herd. This person is another reason why sensible people need to be brought back into ranching. Sensible people who respect life and who are compassionate about their animals and don’t view them as commodities need to be in ranching. It is so distressing that unscrupulous ranches view horses as commodities and “livestock” and are perfectly willing to “dispose” of their horses when it is convenient for them to do so. Have any of these ranchers heard of supply and demand? Well bred horses are still selling for a lot of money. However, backyard breeders who breed poor breeding stock will never sell their horses for a lot of money. Junk in equals junk out. However, it is the horse who suffers the ultimate price of death. It is not the horse’s fault. It is the fault of insensible people.
Horses were domesticated by HUMANS. Horses trust humans and it is a distinct betrayal for HUMANS to “dispose” of them. Horses are not cattle. Humans didn’t domesticate cattle. Horses form bonds with humans and it is reprehensible for HUMANS to now betray them because they can make money by selling their horses to slaughter.
These people will use any excuse to justify horse slaughter. Horse slaughter is a business for greedy people to earn a fast buck.
What needs to be done is a change in the wording presented for legislative purposes first! Even if Congress does pass another law protecting horses the killer buyers (sellers) will do it anyways or work around it. Let’s say basically if a new law states one cannot transport horses to Mexico and Canada for human consumption. Well the auction sales will say they are selling and buyers will say they are buying for some other purpose. When they get on Mexican or Canadian grounds well that all can change. Just as they are doing now they r working around the law and avoiding technicalities (or doing it anyways). What legislation has to stiputlate is 1. Horse breeders can only multiply and breed horses that they will fully be financially responsible for for the full life of the horse. We cannot allow wild breeders for the sake of greed and money reasons to breed and just breed til the right race horse pops out there. 2. Legislation has to stipulate that race horses used in the arena cannot be transported outside the country (when they are through with them) and the owner has to bear full financial responsibility for the care and upkeep after “he is through with the horse”. This will weed through a more respectable type of race horse owner as opposed to the unethical, uncaring, purposeless owner who just collects horse after horse to build his/her personal fortunes.
3. All horses of age cannot be cruelly transported outside the country…end of story here. We all know that horses in their mid years mostly get sold through those unethical, inhumane, and evil channels to slaughter. This part of the law would end the “working around the law or loophole law that exists now”.
The rebut would come in the form of “but we want our good friend Jose to have one of our horses in Mexico…why shouldn’t we be allowed to give our good friend Jose a horse or two?”. Now that sounds a bit fishy but ok let’s say someone does want to give an older horse to a friend outside the country. Fine, but one essential ingredient has to exist! No auctioning to buyers who buy for Mexico. If it is on a one two basis that appears to be clean then it may be ok. But then you may get 5,000 unethical horse race owners who stabled their horses claiming “Oh I just want my friend Jose to have my horse in Mexico”. But a new auction limitation and law would define the fact that “horses cannot be auctioned for usage in Mexico for slaughter or unethical practices” and horses over the age of so and so cannot be auctioned period…end of story.
In my view if a wealthy person can afford to race and train a horse to win him/her lots of money he/she can afford to board and care for the horse afterwards. In other words if you can’t afford to be humane than don’t get into race horsing. Race horsing is just another unethical gambling scheme anyways filled with mafia and evil at times either way. People who just “get rid of em” after racing them usually have the funds to board and care for their horse but because of their unusual and unethical natures don’t do so.
Then there can be the fixture part of law put into place. One can fix the horse not to breed if they know they won’t be able to care and board the horse later. This way one won’t have a ton of horses being born over and over again being sold into the slaughter houses. What America upholds here in the States America has to uphold elsewhere that is if America doesn’t allow a form of Canibalism here in the States there is no reason to allow it in France, Mexico, or Canada. It still represents America whether on foreign soil or locally. That part of reason is called true integrity.
To halt the problem to begin with or get at the root of the problem is of essence not just putting loopholed legislation in place. The unethical breeders who make fortunes off of the race industry have to addressed fully within the legislation especially or those groups who breed horses to sell for human slaughter and consumption. Those same people can start a kiddy park instead and charge a dollar for a short ride on the horse around the stables and make just as much money if not more. There are other avenues then slaughter or cruel and inhumane transportation. Those countries can breed their own horses and America should finally put a halt on transporting horses to any country for any reason without full verifiable evidence of congriguety with American ideals and beliefs. We don’t eat spiders, dogs, cats, horses, whales, llamas, parrots, seagulls, rats, mice, or people here.
ammKens posted “Horses are not cattle. Humans didn’t domesticate cattle.”
You are kidding right? From the Smithsonian National Zoological Park Kid’s Farm website:
“……Cattle were independently domesticated in what are now India and Pakistan, in the Fertile Crescent, and possibly in Africa…..
By 3000 B.C.E domestic cattle were firmly established in ancient Egyptian farming, religion, and culture. Egyptian tomb paintings depict cattle as sources of meat and milk and as beasts of burden working in fields. The Egyptian cow goddess Hathor was a powerful deity; She was a symbol of creation, motherhood, love, and thought to be the guardian of the dead.
Domestic cattle are versatile animals. Their milk and meat have fed humans for millennia. Their dung has been used for fuel and even as money, and their manure is still a major fertilizer of the world’s crops. As plow animals, they have enabled people to farm land that would otherwise be unusable, and have thus helped spread agriculture to far-flung places. One such place is the American West, where cattle, which were introduced to North America by Spanish explorers, gave rise to ranching, cowboys, and range wars.”
Many cultures throughout history have been able to reconcile the use of animals for many purposes, including food, while concurrently respecting and even worshipping them. The problem is not “slaughter”– once an animal is dead, it does not care what is done with its remains– the problem is owners, breeders, agents, transporters and processors who do not treat living animals with respect and dignity and ensure a humane end when the time comes, regardless of the end use of the remains once that end has been humanely met.
Eastowest makes the case that cattle are domesticated. When was the last time you saw a rider on a cow at a jumping competition? Give me a break. You are just splitting hairs because you want to keep making money from a predatory industry (horse slaughter).
Catch a clue: the majority of the American people want the horrific practice of slaughter to end within and across our borders. The US does not raise horses for human consumption like cattle. Your circular argument is just that, a circular argument.
Horses that go to slaughter have drugs that are dangerous to humans such as bute. Horses are given other drugs such as wormer which if you read on the side of the box says NOT TO USE FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.
Your so-called justifications for slaughter are nonsense. You just want to make a fast buck by loading DOMESTICATED horses on a trailer. You don’t care about the horses. All you care about is the almighty dollar. It is well known that killers earn $60,000 a month by selling horses to slaughter. Who do you think you are kidding?
Horse slaughter does NOT reduce the number of unwanted horses.
http://www.kaufmanzoning.net/horsemeat/AnimalLawCoalitionRelease061808.htm
Slaughter… is useless as a tool for controlling the unwanted horse population and instead simply creates a … market that competes with potential buyers of … horses and encourages a continuous supply.”
"John Holland, senior analyst for AAHS (Americans Against Horse Slaughter) explained further, “The trends are irrefutable. We found that equine abuse levels are clearly linked to economic conditions but that slaughter trends were antithetical to them for most of the study period. We now see that what drives horse slaughter is the market for horse meat in Europe and Asia. American horses are killed for their meat and not because they are unwanted or abandoned. The demand for horsemeat creates a market where horse slaughter “kill buyers” compete with other people who want to buy horses. This encourages owners to supply that market through over-breeding horses, for example.” The study’s findings confirmed an earlier Italian study of horse meat consumption from 1995-2001."
These results prove that MONEY drives horse slaughter NOT the number of unwanted horses.
Why must we keep an industry in operation that 80% of Americans oppose, just to accommodate criminals?
Slaughter is the economic underpinning for indiscriminate over breeding, PMU factory farming of horses and its by-product foal genocide, consumer fraud, horse theft, the extermination of our wild mustangs, and irresponsible horse ownership in general.
because it was obvious horse slaughter could not be made humane according to the standards in its 2000 Report, AVMA simply changed the requirements in its 2007 Euthanasia Report! In that report the AVMA removed any mention that horses’ heads should be immobilized during use of the captive bolt gun. That pesty requirement that slaughterhouses ignored anyway simply got in the way of the AVMA’s campaign to convince Congress and the public that horse slaughter is "humane". Now the AVMA is effectively telling Congress and the public that it is humane euthanasia for an untrained operator to fire metal bolts at a horse’s unrestrained head until it is more or less unconscious and then, still alive and perhaps even conscious, subjected to the slaughtering process.
Kill buyers are looking for healthy horses that can be slaughtered for horsemeat, a delicacy in parts of Europe and Asia.
The USDA has said over 92% of American horses slaughtered, are healthy and sound. The horse slaughter industry actually encourages the over breeding of horses. Because owners can make money from the brutal slaughter of their horses, they have an incentive to over breed. If the slaughter of horses for human consumption is illegal, there is no reward for over breeding. Pet Abuse.com actually reported a decrease in horse abuse and neglect cases following closure of the last U.S. horse slaughter house in 2007.
Historically, there have not been increases in abandoned, neglected or abused horses following closures of horse slaughter houses. In 2002 the Illinois slaughter house burned to the ground and was out of commission for some time. Reports of abandoned, abused and neglected horses in the Illinois area were actually on the rise in the 2 years before the fire but decreased afterwards.
The number of horses slaughtered in the U.S. dropped significantly from over 300,000 annually in the 1990s to 66,000 in 2004. There was no notable increase during that time of abandoned, abused or neglected horses.
A recent study of trends in horse slaughter revealed the number of horses slaughtered was determined by a demand for horse meat primarily in Europe and not by the number of unwanted or abandoned horses. These findings contradict horse slaughter industry claims that if horse slaughter is banned, there will be large numbers of abandoned, unwanted horses. The demand for horsemeat creates a market where horse slaughter "kill buyers" compete with people who want to buy horses. This encourages owners to supply that market through over-breeding horses, for example. If slaughter of American horses for human food is made illegal, there would be less incentive to over-breed horses. The study shows that there would be no significant or sustained increase in unwanted or abandoned horses. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/06/prweb1034414.htm
None of the horses going to slaughter are tested for drugs that are contraindicated for human use. The side of the wormer box states "not to be used in animals destined for human consumption." No one knows the number of horses treated with this drug.
House slaughter is contrary to American values and given today’s renewed patriotism, our message is more poignant than ever. If we do not protect our domesticated and wild horses against slaughter for human consumption abroad then America has indeed, lost her very soul.