“Several points…..
According to the GAO report out earlier this summer there have been some serious side effects to the ban on funding for inspections for horse carcasses (the reason horse commercial horse slaughter for human consumption stopped in this country in ’05)…some of those are a lowering of the general price of horses across the board as well as a more severe drop in pricing for lower quality animals…this occured BEFORE the economic crunch came down. There have also been increased reports of neglect and abandonment…unfortunately most of those stats are kept only on a county wide basis for most of the country so gathering them into a national figure is not done but those few states that do keep stats did show an increase. My own area normally sees 4-5 domestic horses thrown out to run with the mustangs each winter. In the last several winters those numbers have gone up to 15-20 domestic horses let go. This is in one small area. A vet near Hardin, MT reports 1200 estimated dumped horses within one ranching area.
Chemical euthanasia is expensive….I live for instance 70 miles from the nearest vet. If I have an appointment it’s $200 for him to drive in the driveway plus the cost of whatever is done. If it’s an emergency it’s double that and there is talk that service out this far is likely to be stopped due to driving distances involved. Once I have a chemically euthanized animal laying on the place I have to have it buried to prevent poisoning the scavengers that will otherwise eat it….coyotes, hawks, magpies, crows, bald and golden eagles among them. Cost of burial….4 hour minimum fee for the backhoe….$450. Risk of burial….a water table that is 35-40 feet down and feeds my well. Some areas of the country are no longer allowing burial or landfill dumping of chemically euthanized animals and require cremation. Cremation allows the chemicals involved to be released into the air…not sure that is much better than being in the water. And cremation is not available in all areas of the country. Neither is rendering, the other often mentioned option. Since BSE showed up and rendering plants have to deal with potentially hazardous waste from such cattle many have shut down. To my knowledge there is ONE in my area and that’s over 100 miles away, makes one trip out in this area a week.
Horse meat has historically been eaten in this country for several hundred years. It was in stores in Portland, Oregon in the early/mid 70′s. It supported our troops through two world wars. It was on Harvards menu into the 80′s. There are no laws against slaughter and butcher of your own horse and there are people who do this. There are ethnic groups within this country who historically and culturally have eaten horse for thousands of years.
In terms of safety the reason there are questions regarding drug residues in horse meat is that there have not been studies done to determine clearance/withdrawal times. These HAVE been done on cattle and so we know how long it takes for a beef steer to clear down to acceptable levels of various drugs (and yes, beef cattle do in general get far more in the way of drugs than the average horse). The tube of horse wormer sitting on my desk at the moment has an 8 DAY clearance for cattle. Most drugs are stored in fat. Cattle have more fat than horses and more marbled fat within the meat. We know the withdrawal times on cattle. It could easily be extrapolated that the time on the same drugs in horses would be less as they have less fat in which to store the drugs. Virtually all livestock used for food have multiple drugs given to them throughout their lives including antibiotics, growth hormones etc. Studies would be fairly short term and fairly inexpensive to do to determine withdrawal times in horses and that would answer this issue.
Horse slaughter did not stop with the lack of funding for inspections….it merely moved across the borders. Horses had to travel further and longer and then those opposed to slaughter here raised a stink about transporting. It wouldn’t have been needed if the funding here had not been stopped. However, in response to the issues they raised horses no longer travel in double decker trailers…haulers spent some big dollars to buy new trailers. Then the fuss was about crowding…apparently those opposed to slaughter think that horses should haul there in slant load goosenecks or something and don’t understand that animals bunched snugly together ride in a more stabalized way than animals that can move around. Then there was the fuss about injured animals and pregnant mares. Injuries happen….no doubt. Horses are animals that some feel are born looking for a way to dramatically hurt themselves. Mares often don’t show pregnant looking until the last 2-3 months and not every pregnancy is known….even vets have been known to miss one when checking and not all owners either know thier mare is pregnant or check her if they think she might be. It’s perfectly possible for a pregnant mare to get on a load of canner horses. Trucks and animals are now inspected at border crossings and injured animals or trucks with violations (which may consist of a non-operating running light) are turned back. Shipping regulations were originally written for animals going to slaughter and when we had horse slaughter in this country those regs could be applied. When horses began going over the borders in larger numbers they were held at feed lots or holding facilities….and transport to such facilities were not regulated in the same way. That has been changed and new regs go into effect in Jan covering all stages/portions of trips from sales yard to slaughter. All of this of course costs money including federal tax funds.
The argument that tax funds should not be used to inspect horse carcasses because it is going to be some astronomical figure doesn’t hold water. Roughly 100,000 carcasses are processed a year. There are roughly 250 work days in a year…365 minus the 104 for weekends and around a dozen for holidays. That means 400 carcasses a work day. Assuming two shifts of work that is 200 a shift or 25 an hour. My info is that federal inspectors make about $25/hr plus benefits. That means $1 per carcass is the cost of inspection. Even if it meant two inspectors working at a time thats still only $200,000 a year (plus benefits). Congress (and virtually any other governing organization) can waste that much money in a single day. It’s a minute drop in the bucket of the federal budget. And I’d rather they spent it on inspecting meat than counting blue spotted something or other butterflies somewhere.
The argument is made that 70% of Americans are opposed to horse slaughter. You can make a survey produce any result you want by simply wording the questions one way vs another. For example…”are you opposed to horse slaughter where a captive bolt is driven into the head of the horse and punctures its skull and then it is hoisted up by a hind leg and the throat cut while the heart is still beating?”…OF COURSE 70% are going to say “YES” to such a question. OR you can ask…”given the following options which would you prefer…. A)a horse to stand in a field, unused, crippled, unwanted and a financial drain on the owner until such time as it dies from malnutrition, starvation or dehydration or B)horse transported while still relatively healthy and in good wt to a facility where it is killed quickly and humanely and the carcass inspected and made use of for meat and other products”? Survey results are all in the wording and presentation.
The hue and cry has been that horse breeders are the source of all these problems. Maybe…. The average horse lives to his mid 20′s. So horses that are adult horses today going to slaughter are ones that were bred in the last 25 years. Over the last 25 years there has been a market for these horses. The baby boomers drove that market for close to 30 years. Now they/we are getting to retirement age. We feel more mortal and we sometimes aren’t as enthused about jumping on a horse and riding as we used to be. Our retirement fund got raided by the Maddofs of the world. Our house is now worth less than it was when we bought it. The costs of everything is higher than we…or anyone….expected. We are aware that our animals may outlive us and we begin to cut back for all of these reasons. Horses are now much more of a luxury than they have been in the last 30 or so years. Breeders cutting back at this point will not change the numbers of adult horses already here. It will put more horses on the market as they cannot carry non-productive animals forever, no matter how good the bloodlines, the breeding program or the horses themselves…and with the market where it is they can’t sell them at anything like a break even point (never mind a profit). Those breeders that are quiting are forced to sell thus adding to the numbers of horses out there. Other breeders are hanging on, often by the skin of their teeth, hoping to ride this out and continue to have good quality animals to breed and sell in the future. If their mares are fairly young they can do this. Leaving older mares, often with irreplacable bloodlines, open (not pregnant) often means they’ll never get pregnant again, resulting in the loss of those lines. With feed costs near or at double the price of a year or two ago in many areas of the country a breeder simply can’t do that for long. As far as numbers go…..according to stats at APHA, AQHA and ApHC (Paint, QH and Appy associations) the numbers of mares being bred are down significantly (as much as 76% in Paints for instance)…info from stallion breeding reports where every mare bred is to be listed. Registration numbers on foals match the reduced numbers of mares bred so it isn’t just that foals aren’t being registered…they aren’t being produced. The ONLY thing this will do is reduce the number of good quality young horses available in the next 3-5 years or so.
Meanwhile…Joe Blow has a grade mare without any pedigree that is a family pet. He also has a couple of kids. He thinks it would be cool for the kids to see a foal born and “grow up with it” and “bond with it” even though he has no experience in breeding or raising and training a foal. And his cousin, down the road a bit, has this two year old grade colt that hasn’t been gelded yet that might make a nice cross (although NEITHER he nor his cousin can tell you the first thing about what makes a GOOD horse or a GOOD cross because they’ve never done a minutes research into it). Repeat this scenario around the country a couple hundred thousand times….and tell me that the breeders that do their homework, invest their money in good stock, spend thousands of hours and dollars in producing one good foal are the ones responsible for this mess.
Lastly, if slaughter of horses is inhumane and “wrong” what is OK about slaughter of other stock? Of cattle and goats, pigs and chickens, calves and lambs? If one is opposed to slaughter of horses on some moral ground then one should also be opposed to slaughter of other animals. And one should have the moral integrity to not use the products of slaughter of any animal…..such as makeup brushes, or additives to your rubber tires on your truck to make them last longer, or insulin, or heparin, or your tetanus shot, or pig valves for heart surgeries, or the casings on your morning sausage (or the sausage itself for that matter) or the strings on violins or any of the other thousands of uses to which animal remains are put to use to make. Most opposed to horse slaughter probably have never walked through a slaughter house and depend only on anti-slaughter videos for their info. Oprah did a tour…you can see it on her site. She thought it would be horrid…it wasn’t. Are there misfires? of course..horses move….and restraining their heads causes many to panic. The captive bolt causes brain death…it doesn’t stop the heart from beating so the horse can be bled out quickly by hoisting and cutting the jugular and carotid vessels…but the horse is BRAIN DEAD…he’s not feeling anything, he’s not aware of anything. The same is true of other livestock slaughtered.
Those that oppose because horses are “pets”….be very careful what you wish for. Horses are about the only livestock that city dwellers ever even see and many of them have never seen or touched on in person. They have romantic notions of “bonding” and see way too many Disney movies. HSUS WANTS you to think of horses as pets because pets are much easier to regulate. Pets can be granted “personhood” (there are bills for this in front of some state legislatures!). Pets can have “guardians” rather than “owners”….so anyone who disagrees with how you handle or treat your pet can appeal for a change in guardianship and simply take it away from you with a court order. Regulations regarding keeping of pets are more easily passed on local levels so you may be required to heat or cool your pets 20 acre field to maintain a required ambient temperature the way dog kennels or catteries do. HSUS and PETA have goals…one of them is the elimination of all use of all domestic animals…for food, for work, for pets….and they think they can do it in one generation.
For those that are opposed to slaughter…no one is forcing you to take or send your horse to slaughter. No one. You don’t like slaughter then keep your animal forever until you put it down. If I’m not making an attempt to control your choices why do you think it OK for you to try and control mine? ”