Showing posts with label horse slaughter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horse slaughter. Show all posts

5/23/14

Plot Against Allowing Horse Slaughter For Meat Thickens

Plot Against Allowing Horse Slaughter For Meat Thickens - Farm Progress

Plot Against Allowing Horse Slaughter For Meat Thickens


What about this, FDA? Are you or are you not going to enforce your own regulations and permanently ban horse slaughter in the US? What are you waiting for?


New findings suggest FDA's own "animals of unknown origins" policy may prevent U.S. resumption of horse slaughter for human consumption.


Published on: Mar 11, 2014
Efforts to prevent the slaughter of American horses for food made significant progress last week. Front Range Equine Rescue, a national nonprofit working to end horse abuse and neglect, discovered that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibits use of animals for meat if those animals don't have sufficient medical records.
It's not clear from the information whether this provision is from the Food Safety and Modernization Act. But FRER, along with the Humane Society of the United States, contends that FDA's policy concerning unsafe toxins and drug residues found in meats should result in a ban on the sale of American horse meat.
FRER found more than 125 FDA citations to producers of adulterated meat reported in the past two years. Citations are issued for failing to maintain complete veterinary treatment records for an animal, failing to systematically review treatment records before slaughter to assure drugs have been administered only as directed, or failing to hold an animal for the proper length of time following treatment. Any of these actions leads to prohibiting use of those animals for meat.


NO MORE HORSEBURGERS? To qualify for slaughter plant sales in the future, horses may be required to have better certified health records.
NO MORE HORSEBURGERS? To qualify for slaughter plant sales in the future, horses may be required to have better certified health records.

No or false verification of safety

Unlike other livestock raised within the agricultural system, virtually all horses sold for meat began as working, competition or sport horses, companion animals or wild horses. "Slaughterers and middlemen have virtually no knowledge about the horses' prior veterinary histories," claims Hilary Wood, president of FRER, "although falsified documents are often used to suggest they do."
"Horses are often used from show rings to trail riding to therapy programs. They're treated with many different drugs throughout their lives because horse owners don't expect they could end up as meat," adds Wood. "We are committed to preventing the slaughter of horses for human consumption to protect human health, the environment, and horses from cruelty and suffering."


Plot Against Allowing Horse Slaughter For Meat Thickens
Plot Against Allowing Horse Slaughter For Meat Thickens

In March 2012, FRER and HSUS filed a petition requesting that FDA certify all horses and horse meat from American horses as "unqualified" for human consumption. The petition lists more than 110 drugs and other substances commonly administered to horses that are or should be prohibited.
More than 100,000 American horses are sent to slaughter each year, mainly for consumption in Europe and Asia. The current federal budget stripped away USDA funding for horse slaughter operations. But Wood says it remains to be seen whether that funding will be restored come October.
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5/19/14

Another Important Message From John Holland - President of the Equine Welfare Alliance - on Attacks in Social Media

This was first published on the EWA Newsletter which can be seen online here.

This post will be my only comment on the unfortunate situation that only serves to demonstrate how quickly some can forget that their stated goal was to help horses - something this ugly infighting does not accomplish. To say I'm shocked and disappointed would be quite the understatement. 

For the past week, various Facebook pages have been full of wild claims and speculation regarding the resignation of an EWA board member. We have not commented on this resignation because it is our policy, like every reputable organization, to keep board matters confidential.



We have worked very hard to become a respected organization that provides accurate information in an unemotional context. This is the reason that we can now be accepted as a source at legal proceedings, in legislative hearings and by the press.



We have therefore stated only that it is against our policy to become involved in any way with public attacks on other animal welfare organizations or in supporting them against such attacks. It is our position that these attacks, justified or not, serve only to undermine the credibility of our entire movement.



We have repeatedly been asked whether the requested resignation was the result of our supporting AC4H. No, it was not, nor did it involve a single incident.



Now that I have been personally attacked for over a week, I have many wonderful examples of why this sort of Facebook vigilantism is so destructive to the image of our movement and to its cohesiveness. People have speculated wildly and recklessly about a situation of which they know absolutely nothing. They have been willing to believe that I would suddenly, and with no justification, ask for the resignation of a board member and then offered completely irrelevant material as proof.



For example, a photo of me standing with Christy Sheidy was offered as proof that I support her. A few posts later someone recognized that the picture was from a 2008 anti-slaughter conference in Washington, and was one of dozens of pictures of me and other participants standing together. So the image proved only that Christy Sheidy and I had both taken the time and effort to attend an anti-slaughter conference.



Furthermore, publicly calling people names like Crusty Sheidy or Christy Shady is so adolescent as to make me cringe. We do not need this kind of discourse at any level, against anyone, and to imagine that it somehow helps the horses is delusional.



The posting of a public notice of a tax lien was given as the reason for dismissal.  Posting public documents is acceptable and commonplace. However, I might mention that it was posted with a comment stating that it proved AC4H had not declared income from its broker program - a comment intended to invite controversy. That comment turned out not to be true and is typical of the kind of thing that makes people question the accuracy of other information being provided.  Still, it was far from the reason for this entire debacle.



Let me put it bluntly. This kind of war is moronic and of utterly no help to the horses at all. While a river of horses go over the borders, countless hours are being wasted on a McCarthyesque witch hunt to see if this person or that supports an operation that is already under investigation by authorities and all but totally defunct. People I have known and worked with for years have somehow lost all reason and joined in this blood sport without asking "What is to be gained and what could be lost?"



I do see where some people have injected interesting facts such as the point that I was one of the first people to question whether it wouldn't be better to buy horses by bidding against kill buyers rather than buying them from kill buyers and thus putting money in their pockets.



But let me suggest we think deeper. We all regard the kill buyers with disdain, but even if we bought every horse out from under them at auction we would still be stuck with the problem because it would merely enrich those doing the over-breeding and dumping the horses! We can't rescue our way out of slaughter folks.



Finally, I must point out that this former board member has decided to divulge and embellish confidential board discussions in hopes that it would embarrass EWA and add to her support. That is both unethical and illegal, and speaks to the individual's understanding of the duties of a board of directors.



Now having read this, each of you are free to go back to banging out useless flaming posts in hopes of collecting "likes" (whatever they are worth) or working with us to end the slaughter and abuse of American horses. Which will it be?



John Holland
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2/1/14

A Message From Equine Welfare Alliance President John Holland

 Hi Folks,

This is part three concerning the omnibus bill. Part one, as many of you have discerned, was our optimistic New Year's message hinting at good things ahead, and part two was the announcement of the defunding language in the omnibus budget and how it got there.

These developments have led to the question of how long this will stop slaughter houses from returning to the US. I will attempt to explain the answer to that question. Like most things in Washington, the answer is a bit convoluted. However, I think it is safe to say it will stop their return for at least two years and here is why.

Budgets are, as we all know, a one-year affair that begins October 1st. The process is supposed to start with the President's budget, which is broken into 12 separate budgets (such as the Agriculture Budget), which in turn go to the various appropriations committees to be amended.

These budgets are then supposed to go to the floor of their respective houses for a vote. Following their passage in the Senate and House, the resulting budgets are supposed to go to a conference committee to hammer out differences, and then back to the House and Senate for a final vote.

But if there is one consistent theme in Congress, it is that they almost never do things the way they are supposed to. According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress has passed a full budget only three times in the past 26 years! Most years they pass a CR for all or most individual budgets.

Last year, the agriculture budgets got through the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, but neither reached their respective floors for a vote. Both budgets had defunding language, as did the President's budget. The budget for other departments didn't even get that far.

A CR, or Continuing Resolution, is merely a way of keeping spending at the same level (or at some multiple of the current level) for an additional period. The duration can be from a day to as much as the remainder of the current budget year.

An omnibus budget is yet another way for Congress to shortcut its budgeting process. This fiscal year, we got a series of short CRs, followed by an omnibus budget.

Since the omnibus was based on the bipartisan budget "framework" agreement reached a month earlier, and since that agreement was for two years, we can be sure that the 2015 budget will be a one-year CR.

Now it gets kind of ironic. The late Sue Wallis, Dave Duquette and even Charlie Stenholm had speculated publicly, and no doubt prayed, that there would be a CR for 2014. That would have continued the funding for inspections from the previous 2012 and 2013 budgets.

However there is something call an "anomaly" that can be added to a CR to place a restriction on certain funds. Since nobody was sure the omnibus would pass, a CR was indeed prepared and tucked away to keep the government funded the rest of the year if the omnibus blew up.

That CR contained an anomaly that prohibited any funds from being used for horse slaughter inspections. So had they been forced to use the CR, it would have had the same outcome (defunding). We knew this well before the budget deal was struck, and actually expected that is the way things would go.

And why is this important going forward? It is important because it was none other than Secretary Vilsack who signed off on the anomaly. That explains why Victoria wanted to thank him. It also means that it will be virtually impossible for the pro-slaughter camp to accomplish a removal of the defunding language for the 2015 budget CR.

So the plants are locked out for two years and probably more. And that is the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would have said.

1/29/14

"Slaughterhouse" Sue Wallis Dead

reblogged from Straight From the Horse's Heart

A Statistical Analysis of Slaughterhouse Sue
By John Holland ~ President of the Equine Welfare Alliance

“Sue is a compulsive fact creator…”

"Slaughterhouse" $ue Wallis
“Slaughterhouse” $ue Wallis


Hi, my name is John Holland, and I am a data-holic. I usually spend my day furtively downloading statistics and information; analyzing it, graphing it, correlating it and trying to glean insights into the true workings of the horse world.
But today is different. Today, I was inspired to opine by a thing of great rarity in our struggle; a well researched article. It appeared in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch titled Horse slaughterhouse plans stalled in Missouri and it convinced me we are winning this struggle, at least for the moment.
No, the article did not contain a new revelation about the outcome of a court case, or the result of a vote. It contained something even more telling: It documented Sue Wallis slipping beyond the gravitational pull of reality and into an alternate universe of anti-logic, where up is down and dark is light.
Sue begins the interview with her now familiar claim that she chose Missouri because, “If you draw a 500-mile circle from western Missouri you encapsulate 30 percent of the horse herd in the U.S.” After musing over the concept of the US horse population constituting a single “herd”, I began wondered where she got this statistic.
You see, Sue and I share different forms of compulsion. I am a compulsive fact checker while Sue is a compulsive fact creator. So I ran the numbers and the result I got was 23.6% of the US horse population being within 500 miles (as the crow flies) of western Missouri.
This means Sue’s exaggeration coefficient for this statement is 27%[i]. This modest exaggeration would prove to be her perigee with reality before she would slingshot past it and off into the abyss of deep space.
After describing the law suit that had resulted in the Cole County judge’s directive to the Department of Natural Resources to hold off on issuing Rains the discharge permit, the story returned to the interview with Sue.
Wyoming's "$laughterhou$e" $ue Walli$ ~ photo by Pam Nickoles
“The horse industry has been decimated,” Wallis said. “We have worthless horses being turned out and abandoned.”
As I read this, I again felt compelled to calibrate Wallis’ definition of decimation. The original term came from quaint custom of the Roman army by which they would execute every tenth soldier of a disgraced unit so as to improve morale. Was every tenth horse in America being abandoned?
 The only state I could find that keeps abandonment data is New Mexico. During my research, they provided me with a very detailed list of all the estray horses they had picked up since 2006. Last year they picked up exactly 124 horses.
 Given the estimated 147,181 horses in New Mexico, this means that the abandonment rate is 0.06% or one horse in every 1,186. Since decimation would be one in ten (10%), Sue’s exaggeration coefficient had suddenly rocketed from 27% to 16,666%.
Parroting the discredited 2011 GAO report, Wallis went on to say “People take care of animals that have value. It’s when they don’t that they neglect them.”
This was the conjecture used to excuse why the GAO studied horse prices instead of actually studying neglect as it had been assigned to do. It is, of course, utter nonsense. Few household pets have any monetary value, yet most people take good care of them.
It gets better. “Every breed registry is down 70 percent since 2007. Fewer colts are being born,” Wallis said.
Apparently Wallis has data I have not seen; data showing among other things that only the birth rate of colts is in decline. Is there some strange gender asymmetry going on here? Or is it possible that the Executive Director of the International Equine Business Association, the expert of CNN interviews and countless articles does not know that colts are males and the proper term would have been foals?
As for “every breed registry being off 70% since 2007”, Sue’s exaggeration coefficient is pretty substantial. According to the Jockey Club, thoroughbred foal registrations are off 34.5%, not 70%. Some breeds appear to have been almost unaffected, but the AQHA’s annual report does show about a 49% reduction in foal registrations from its peak in 2007.
"Slaughterhouse" $ue Wallis ~ Horse guts and blood are what drives this political nut-job
 “Slaughterhouse” $ue Wallis ~ Horse guts and blood
are what drives this political nut-job




The pattern with Quarter Horses is a familiar one for those of us who have been around the horse world for a few decades. Breeds come into favor, resulting in indiscriminate breeding spurred on by the greed of their breed registry. Then the bubble bursts. Just before the decline began, the then executive vice president of the AQHA, Bill Brewer, gave an impassioned speech at their annual convention urging more breeding so there would be “enough good horses in the future”.
A great breed has been degraded in the process. Quarter Horses now commonly suffer from a wide range of maladies such as GBED, HERDA, HYPP, and Navicular. The most common complaint of owners is that they “bred the feet off them.” This could explain why AQHA membership is down 18.6% since 2007. I wondered to myself, would Sue suggest killing off a bunch of their remaining members as a solution to the decline?
Sue continues, “That’s 70 percent less feed being sold, 70 percent fewer jobs, 70 percent fewer veterinarians.”
Apparently Sue believes that a short term drop in foal (excuse me colt) births means that the whole horse population suddenly drops by the same percentage. Despite Sue’s best efforts, horses do often live well into their 20s and beyond, meaning that recent foal crops would represent only a few percent of the population.
With a nearly 50% decrease in foals, the population of registered quarter horses dropped from 3,218,113 in 2007 to 2,978,776 in 2012 according to the AQHA annual reports, a decline of just 7.4%. Here Sue gets an exaggeration coefficient of 945%.
But at this point her thinking turns to what I will call anti-logic, because if it came into contact with rational thought the two would annihilate each other with a thunderous clap, probably decapitating their host. She is proclaiming that all of this devastation is because we have too few horses as a direct result of not killing enough of them! This would be laughable if 2012 had not seen more US horses slaughtered than any year since 1994!
One survival strategy of prey animals is to synchronize their birthing so as to overwhelm their predators. Sue has adopted this strategy with her spontaneously created facts. She spews so many at one time that at least a few have a good chance to get past us unchallenged.
At this point in the interview, Sue seems to sense her interviewer is not buying her nonsense. So she throws her hyperbole engine into warp drive, saying “This has wrecked communities — all because of the elitist snooty arrogance of this bunch of people telling us what’s culturally acceptable to eat.”
The community of Boggy Bottom, the neighborhood behind the Dallas Crown slaughter house, was truly devastated by the pollution, stench and crime caused by the plant. I witnessed it firsthand. But where is Sue’s example of a community devastated by a lack of slaughter? Apparently with anti-logic you automatically get an anti-logic twin to Boggy Bottom, at least in the brain of Sue Wallis.
It is impossible for me to calculate the exaggeration factor for this statement because, since there is no truth at all to be exaggerated, it would require dividing by zero. I think I now fully understand Einstein’s quote about only the universe and human stupidity being infinite.
Yet the second half of the outburst is the most interesting of all.
Sue had apparently learned that the influential Busch brothers (former owners of Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch) had thrown their considerable weight into the battle on the side of the horses. Victoria McCullough had sent them a link to our report How the GAO deceived Congress, and Victoria said she thinks the outrage at this government deceit had caused them to weigh in.
Lately there has been an avalanche of high profile support for ending horse slaughter completely. In the government sector; President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary Vilsack have all come out against horse slaughter. At the state level, New Mexico’s Governor Susana Martinez, former governor Bill Richardson, Attorney General Gary King and others have spoken up for the horses. Celebrities such as the incredibly influential Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg have also taken a stand.
But most aggravating of all for Sue are the “snooty, arrogant billionaires”. This is because Sue knows that the money from big agriculture was the only advantage she had in this battle. Internationally known equestrian Victoria McCullough and her “snooty arrogant” friends, are serving to balance the scales by using their resources to multiply the impact of the tireless grass roots work of thousands of horse lovers and animal welfare organizations. This combination may well bring Slaughterhouse Sue crashing back to reality.

[i] How does a 6.4% error become an exaggeration factor of 27%?
Use this formula ((30-23.6)*100)/23.6), or ask your friendly local nerd.

9/28/13

Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act

PCRM | Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act

Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act


The Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act, a crucial bill to protect both consumers’ health and American horses, was recently introduced in Congress. This legislation will prohibit the sale and transport of horse meat and horses intended for human consumption, thereby keeping toxic meat out of the nation’s food supply.
 Because horses in the United States are raised as companions and sport animals—not for human consumption—they are routinely given hundreds of drugs and chemicals that could cause harm to human health if their meat is ingested. Many of these substances have never been tested on humans, while some are known to be deadly if ingested by people. These pharmaceuticals—steroids, antibiotics, growth promoters, sedatives, artificial hormones, vaccines, painkillers, and others—are often labeled “not for use in animals used for food/that will be eaten by humans,” and more than 50 drugs regularly administered to horses are expressly prohibited by federal regulations for use in food animals.
There is no system in place to track these medications and veterinary treatments to ensure that horse meat is safe for human consumption. Even small traces of these chemicals in adulterated horse meat could pose serious health risks, most of which are completely unknown.

Please click here to urge your members of Congress to keep toxic horse meat out of the food supply by co-sponsoring and supporting the SAFE Act.
 Please follow the above link and support the SAFE Act. Let's keep horse slaughter out of our country!
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9/22/13

Boycott Beef Until the SA.F.E. Act Is Passed

Boycott Beef until the SA.F.E. Act is passed


Petition by Habitat for Horses 
   

We tried to reason, we spent our money in courts fighting you, we've taken those we’ve managed to save and watched our government bow to the horse slaughter industry. We’ve filed bills in Congress and watched them die, spent a ton of money trying to stop the roundups and slaughter, yet it continues unabated.

One hundred seventy thousand horses a year, 472 a day, one every 4.8 minutes, die in a slaughterhouse. Year after year, we have sought to bring it to an end. No one listened, most of the cattle industry laughed at us.

It’s time for that laughter to end.

The beef industry  has always been in full support of the horse slaughter industry. You've worked hand-in-hand with the AQHA and the BLM as they push for horse slaughter, and your influence in all 50 state Farm Bureaus has been consistent. You've taken every word from the paid propagandists and force fed them to the Farm Bureau members.

Knowing full well that your facts are pure lies, you have convinced those inside the Beltway to believe that you are the saviors of the horse industry.

You aren’t. You are horse killers, wanting nothing better for the horses of America than you want for your cattle - to be slaughtered and served to the consumer for a profit.

Now it’s time for the 80% to strike back in a way that will force you to listen.

Starting now, we pledge that we will not buy nor consume another bite of beef until the S.A.F.E Act is passed and signed into law. No hamburgers, no BBQ beef, no steak, no fast food with beef. And we ask that every person that is against horse slaughter do the same.

To:
American Farm Bureau Foundation, Executive Director
National Cattlemen's Beef Association

As an American horse advocate, I pledge that I will not buy beef of any kind until the SAFE Act is passed and the American horse is free from the threat of slaughter!

Not a dollar of my money will enter your pocket until you and your supporting organizations take the action necessary to support and pass the SAFE Act.

Sincerely,
[Your name]
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8/24/13

The European Commission Has Failed to Stem That Tide of Horse Meat Imports.

The European Commission Has Failed to Stem The Tide of Horse Meat Imports.



Expertvoices_02_ls_v2[2]
horse-meat 

Swabe is the European Union Director for Humane Society International. This piece is adapted from the article Scant Progress Made in EU Hors emeat Regulation on Horsetalk. Swabe contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The horse meat scandal, it seems, is far from over. One only needs to look at the recent case revealing Latvian horse meat in frozen meat-pies sold in the United Kingdom (UK) to see that horse meat fraud is widespread.

Even in the legal horse meat trade, things are not completely transparent. It has been three years since the European Union (EU) introduced strict new requirements for the import of horse meat from non-EU countries, yet meat from horses that should never have been slaughtered for export continues to arrive on the EU market. The European Commission has failed to stem that tide of horse meat imports.

The question is, when can we expect the commission to act?

Officials have yet to explicitly link imports from non-EU countries and the horse meat implicated in the recent UK fraud. However, for those of us working to protect horses, the discoveries of illicit horse meat in beef burgers, lasagne and pies provides a missing puzzle piece: could this be where so much of the horse meat imported into the EU is going?

Food suppliers already lawfully and routinely process horse meat into cheap convenience foods in some parts of Europe without many consumers realizing it (unless they read the small print). It is easy to see how unscrupulous operators have been able to launder horse meat into the food chain by passing it off as beef. The rise of processed meat products explains, in part, the apparent surfeit of horse meat in Europe, because most consumers are not clamoring to eat it.

Indeed, the European horse meat industry has been in steady decline since the 1960s as both culinary tastes and cultural attitudes have gradually changed. Even in France and Italy, traditional heartlands of horse slaughter and consumption, the number of horses killed has waned significantly. Statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that in 1961, 333,000 horses were slaughtered in France and 283,000 horses were slaughtered in Italy. By 2011, the numbers had dropped to 15,500 and 62,237, respectively.

Evidently, only a minority of French and Italian consumers are actually going out of their way to regularly consume horse flesh. A survey conducted by Ipsos MORI for Humane Society International in 2012 found that only 50 percent of respondents in France and 58 percent in Italy believed that it was acceptable to eat horses. Moreover, most respondents said they never or only sometimes eat horse meat, whilst a mere 3 percent of Italians and 4 percent of French claimed to eat it frequently.
The fact is, Europe's declining horse meat industry is supplemented by significant global imports. EU import statistics show large quantities of horse meat annually being imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and Uruguay.

Even when horse meat appears on the label of processed meat products with no question of food fraud, without mandatory origin labeling, EU consumers still have no idea where that meat came from. Why does that matter? Because imported horse flesh that fails to meet EU food safety standards poses a potentially serious health hazard.

The end of July marked three years since the EU introduced stricter import requirements. Only imports of horse meat from horses with a known lifetime medical-treatment history, and whose records showed they satisfied veterinary medicine withdrawal periods, are supposed to be allowed in to the EU. Yet, measures taken by export countries to preclude veterinary drug residues from entering the food chain are not fit for purpose.

Approximately 20 percent of horse meat consumed in the EU comes from Canada and Mexico, but the majority of that meat actually derives from U.S. horses — which are not raised for slaughter, but instead vendors acquired the horses from random sources. This is worrying because, in the United States, the use of veterinary drugs such as phenylbutazone — a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory prohibited in the EU for use in food-producing animals — is widespread, and there is no mandatory, lifetime, veterinary medical record-keeping.

Canada's and Mexico's lack of compliance has been exposed multiple times by non-governmental organizations, journalists and the European Commission's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), including the problem of so-called "kill buyers," who purchase U.S. horses at auction and ship them long distances over the border to be killed for food. Since 2010, FVO audits have found that Canada and Mexico have failed to ensure that all horse meat meets EU requirements.

In the aftermath of one of Europe's biggest-ever food scandals, the European Commission has consistently failed to act to stop imports of horse meat from third-party countries that do not meet EU food-safety requirements. With consumer confidence at an all time low — exemplified by this recent survey from Ireland — it is the Commission's duty to ensure that meat not considered fit for human consumption by EU standards no longer ends up on EU consumers' plates.
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8/19/13

The Fuzzy Math Being Used to Justify Horse Slaughter in the United States

The Fuzzy Math Being Used to Justify Horse Slaughter in the United States

The Fuzzy Math Being Used to Justify Horse Slaughter in the United States

Did closing slaughterhouses really lead to an increase in animal abuse?

   
The animal entry of a slaughterhouse. (PHOTO: GOEKCE NARTTEK/SHUTTERSTOCK)

The vast majority of Americans—over 80 percent—oppose the idea of slaughtering horses in the United States. Not surprisingly, there was minimal public opposition when, in 2007, Congress, citing rampant welfare abuse and safety violations, cut off funding for the USDA inspection of U.S. horse slaughterhouses. This decision effectively ended the business of slaughtering horses domestically.
In November 2011, however, an agriculture appropriations bill signed by Congress reinstated funding for inspection. The legislative path for states to reopen horse slaughterhouses is now clear. Today, with the domestic cattle market in a drought-induced tailspin, New Mexico, Missouri, Wyoming, Tennessee, Iowa, and Oklahoma are on the verge of sending horses it once sent to Canadian and Mexican slaughterhouses into the clutches of domestic abattoirs. Other states, seeking a way to capitalize on horses that have lost their value or can be bought cheaply at meat prices, are eager to follow. A New Mexico meat processing plant has even made arrangements with the Navajo Nation to corral wild horses in anticipation of the impending slaughter fest. All that’s holding this off for right now is a lawsuit from the Humane Society of the United States.

They’re bucking horses that won’t buck and racehorses that won’t win and quarter horses that nobody is buying from breeders because hay prices are too high.

The pivotal piece of evidence that convinced Congress to change its mind on the matter of domestic horse slaughter was a GAO analysis published in June 2011 (PDF). Senators Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) and Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) and Representative Jack Kingston (R-Georgia) commissioned it. Titled, “Actions Needed to Address Unintended Consequences From Cessation of Domestic Slaughter,” the report found “a rise in investigations for horse neglect and more abandoned horses since 2007”—the year the plants were closed. The “unintended consequence” of closing horse slaughterhouses, the report explained, was an increase in the abuse of horses. Reinstating domestic slaughterhouses, it suggested, would diminish this rising problem of neglect among owners who neither wanted to keep their horses nor were willing to send them abroad for slaughter. This argument was one that the slaughter lobby has been making since slaughterhouse closings in 2007. Pro-slaughter advocates were more than pleased to hear the news.

Something about this report, however, seemed suspicious before it was even published. Charlie Stenholm, former Texas Congressman and now policy advisor to the D.C.-based law firm Olsson, Frank, and Weeda (which specializes in helping agribusiness negotiate federal red tape and recently hired an attorney who specializes in agricultural deals with Native Americans), told a conference of pro-slaughter interests in Las Vegas that the GAO report—which would not come out for another six months—contained very good news.

When the report officially dropped in June 2011, Stenholm was proven correct. The Senate quickly wrote an appropriations bill removing the provision that defunded inspection. Because the House had an amendment preserving the language, the bill went to committee, where the vote was three to one in favor of restoring funding for domestic horse slaughterhouses. Those three votes came, alas, from Senators Kohl and Blunt and Representative Kingston.

All very fishy. But what really stinks about the GAO report is the math. Because national data is not available on reported horse abuse, the GAO went to six states and found—in the only case of hard numbers that it provides in the entire report—that “Colorado data showed that investigations for horse neglect and abuse increased more than 60 percent from 975 in 2005 to 1,588 in 2009.” Sounds pretty dramatic—until you recall that the slaughter ban passed in 2007. Not 2005.

As it turns out, horse abuse in Colorado did rise rapidly from 2005 through the end of 2007 (before the ban). But, starting in 2008, it declined precipitously through 2010 (a year for which numbers are available but the GAO tellingly admitted). The report thus made it seem as if abuse spiked after the closing of slaughterhouses. In fact, it continued for less than a year after the ban was instated and then declined rapidly.

horse1

Figure 1: Colorado Department of Agriculture data

It is further worth noting that the GAO had access to similar figures on horse abuse investigations from five other states—Illinois, Idaho, Georgia, Maine, and Oregon. The GAO’s decision not to include this information makes little sense unless it was deliberately trying to skew the picture of horse abuse in favor of pro-slaughter interests. To wit: Four states for which there are data show a dramatic decline in horse abuse after 2007 while one—Idaho—shows no movement one way or the other. Ignoring these figures, the GAO decided instead to focus on Colorado, evidently hoping nobody would notice its creative presentation of the numbers.

horse2

Figure 2: Data from the agriculture departments of six states

Despite the report’s suggestion that the need for local slaughterhouses is an urgent matter, the GAO fails to note something quite extraordinary about the situation: Only about one percent of existing domestic horses are slaughtered every year. Ninety-two percent of that one percent, according to Temple Grandin, are healthy and devoid of behavioral problems. They’re bucking horses that won’t buck and racehorses that won’t win and quarter horses that nobody is buying from breeders because hay prices are too high. The only thing that’s urgent in this entire scenario is the desire to profit from sending these healthy horses to slaughter.

Horse abuse and neglect is a small problem that got smaller with the closure of slaughterhouses. The GAO—and the slaughter lobby it seems to represent—falsely presents it as a large problem getting larger. It wants us to envision a situation in which a recession and drought are overwhelming horse owners to the point that they’re neglecting sick and ailing horses en masse. Give them easy access to a domestic slaughterhouse, so goes the argument, and abuse will decline.

In fact, it is the exact opposite that’s true. Abuse went down after slaughterhouses were closed. All that domestic slaughterhouses would provide is an easy and profitable excuse to send many more healthy horses to a premature death for meat that we don’t even eat in this country. It’s all very sad logic upon which to rebuild an industry.

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8/2/13

BREAKING! New Mexico Court Grants Temporary Restraining Order Against Opening Proposed Horse Slaughter Plants!


Great news!


Judge Blocks Planned Horse Slaughter At Two Plants


 — A federal judge on Friday temporarily halted plans by companies in New Mexico and Iowa to start slaughtering horses next week.
U.S. District Judge Christina Armijo issued a restraining order in a lawsuit brought by The Humane Society of the United States and other groups.
I deliberately did not post the rest of the article because it's rife with the usual disinformation about "thousands of abused and unwanted horses across this country," and other ridiculous pro-slaughter propaganda like that.
Here is the link if you want to go comment. The only accurate thing about this story is the temporary restraining order!
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"From my earliest memories, I have loved horses with a longing beyond words." ~ Robert Vavra