10/27/13

Update From Indy


hi everyone! it's me, indy, again with an update on my mom. remember i told you how she broke her wrist in my first post? well she's letting me use her computer again to tell you about whats happening.

she got the pins taken out last week and she says shes much more comfortable with them out. one of the pins had made a sore on her hand but now it's gone and the pain it was causing her has gone and the sore healed.

she still has a cast though and cant use her left hand much at all still. since she is left handed this is putting even more stress on her right hand and this is the hand she injured doing so much keyboard input when she was working. its bothering her a lot now.

hopefully she will get the cast removed in another week and things can start getting back to normal. it may take a while though and she may not be supposed to ride me for a while. thats ok i guess cause we don't ride too much in the winter anyway - at least not on the really cold and windy days. humans dont seem to be able to stand the cold like we horses can. i think it's because they dont grow a decent winter coat and have to keep putting on and taking off those things they use instead of hair. very strange.

ok thanks for reading. hope to report continued progress. mom does type better than me.

love
indy
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10/11/13

An important Message From Indy


hi everyone. im indy, and i have an important message from my mom. you know her as suzanne or morganlvr. shes letting my type this because she really cant type right now. she usually tels me to stay away from her keyboards cuz she says i get hay and carrot pieces in there. 

anyway this is a special case. mom had a very bad fall - not because of me or ami though. she got some pretty bad scrapes and bruises on her face and knees but the worst thin was she broke her left wrist. Yeah real bad and shes left handed besides that.

they took her to the emergency room and xrayed her wrist. she broke the em what did she tell me? radial or radius bone - somethin like that - completely in two just below her wrist joint. kinda like a fetlock I think.
 
the break wouldnt stay together right with just a cast so a couple of days later they did surgery and put 4 pins in that bone to hold it together so it would heal right. she has a big blue cast on her arm.

last tuesday she went to see how it was doing. doc said xray looked real good, and pins can come out in a couple more weeks. but the cast will have to stay on for more weeks after that. I know that cast is driving her crazy because she has to use her right hand for everything and that's real frustrating for her. her left hand has the cast clear up to her knuckles and around her thumb. then it goes almost to her elbow. 

lucky the weather has been great so she can come to the barn every day and groom me. ami doesnt like being groomed much and doesnt always cooperate so well so moms stickin with me. ok by me! i love attention and i try to be very careful of her space. 

mom can brush out my forelock and mane with her right hand and give me a light grooming. thats fine with me - we love just hanging out with each other anyway. 

she just wanted me to post this for her so youall would know why shes not commenting much and that shes really ok but typing is very hard. I told her Id be happy to post all the comments she wanted but she found some hay sticking out of her keyboard and told me i was sweet to offer but this would be fine. Golly, i dont know where that hay came from. 

any way she just wanted to check in. thanks for reading. i hope i got it all typed ok.

love

indy
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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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"From my earliest memories, I have loved horses with a longing beyond words." ~ Robert Vavra