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.

 

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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Trojan Horse Slaughter

James McWilliams

04/17/2013 | 9:28 am

As Americans watch Europeans condemn the discovery of horsemeat in their Ikea meatballs, we can take some solace in the fact that, for once, we’ve sidestepped an industrial food-related travesty. Our complacency, however, could be short-lived. Although less dramatic than horse DNA adulterating ground beef, another horse-related scandal is about to implicate U.S. citizens in a scheme that will send tainted horse meat into foreign markets while enriching U.S. horse slaughterers with taxpayer dollars.

The last U.S.-based horse slaughterhouse closed in 2007. The phasing out of horse slaughter in the United States ended the exportation of U.S.-produced horse meat to Canada, Europe, and Japan. This development, among other accomplishments, spelled the decline of a niche business that profited from a product that American taxpayers financially supported (through USDA inspection of horse slaughterhouses) but were loathe to consume (plus, it’s illegal to sell horse meat in the U.S.).
Over the past six years, though, a small cohort of national lobbyists and state representatives has worked to reopen U.S. horse slaughterhouses. Five states—Oklahoma, Montana, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Iowa—have already taken legislative steps in that direction. Their collective justification for doing so is that U.S. slaughterhouses are better for the welfare of horses. Without them, they argue, an endless stream of retired race horses will inevitably head to Mexico for slaughter, a terrifying prospect for animals who, advocates further contend, will meet an especially gruesome south-of-the-border death.

On the surface, this argument seems to make sense. Why slaughter horses abroad when we can do so at home? A closer look, however, reveals three problems, each of which suggests that any claim to reinstate horse slaughter on welfare grounds is simply a cynical ploy to dupe Americans into supporting a business most of us find abhorrent.

First, advocates of U.S. horse slaughter—the very people who insist they care about shortening the distance a horse travels for slaughter—opposed legislation restricting the distance horses could travel in the aftermath of the American closings. Sue Wallis, a Wyoming state representative and the most vocal proponent of reopening slaughterhouses (they call her “Slaughterhouse Sue”), wrote in 2009 that, “A key early initiative is to muster resources to oppose bills now pending in Congress that would ban the transportation of horses to other countries for the purpose of slaughter.” The intent here was as simple as it was sinister: to normalize long horse hauls to foreign soil and then highlight its inherent cruelty, thereby buttressing the case for a more “humane” local option.

Second, the claim that Mexican slaughterhouses are comparatively inhumane is equally problematic. Plants where U.S. horses have been slaughtered in Mexico are owned by the same European Union companies that once owned horse slaughterhouses in the United States. Supporters of local slaughter suggest that U.S. horses are being killed in an especially cruel and unregulated manner in Mexican-owned slaughterhouses, mainly by stabbing them in the spine. In fact, EU companies deploy standard procedures, using (most notably) captive bolt guns to stun horses before bleeding and processing them, just as they do in Europe and once did in the U.S. Ironically, the only documented cases we have of horse slaughterhouse cruelty and abuse come from the U.S. (back when slaughterhouses were legal).

Third, advocates of U.S. horse slaughter insist that, without the re-institution of slaughter at home, an unmanageable number of horses will continue to suffer the indignities described above. But the numbers don’t support this claim. Nearly 90 percent of U.S. horses die of natural causes or are euthanized at home. Bill Bullard, a California state representative and supporter of U.S. horse slaughter, says that the horse industry is desperate for “a way to dispose of our old, diseased, lame horses.” In fact, that problem has already been solved for the overwhelming majority of horses. They die the way our pets die—more often than not with quiet dignity.

Duplicity is one thing. But the upshot of this manufactured crisis is even worse: an impending public health disaster of global proportions. What supporters of U.S. slaughter never tell us is that the 150,000 or so U.S. horses that are annually slaughtered for export are bombarded daily with a hit list of toxic drugs, most notably phenylbutazone (“bute”), a common painkiller. While innocuous for horses, bute can cause, even in trace doses, aplastic anemia, agranulocytosis, thrombocytopenia, leucopenia, pancytopenia, and hemolytic anemia in humans. Eating U.S. horses, according to Tufts Veterinary professor Nicolas Dodman, “is about as healthful as food contaminated with DDT.”  The USDA currently has no program to regulate these substances.

In other words, lost in all the discussions about horse slaughter and horsemeat is a fundamental point: horses are not raised for food. They are, in essence, an industrial product. For Americans to recycle them into an edible but toxic by-product for foreigners to eat, doing so with taxpayer dollars and through an underfunded USDA, would be bad for everyone involved, most notably the 150,00 horses a year who’d be much better off not being used as Trojan horses to hide the profits of those who claim to care about them.

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European commission may force U-turn on horse passports database

Government ended funding for national database last September and now leaves recording to 75 different bodies

• guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 April 2013 11.58 EDT

David Heath, the minister for agriculture and the environment. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Britain may have to make an embarrassing U-turn over a decision not to fund a national database for horse passports as the EU seeks to tighten controls in the wake of the horsemeat scandal.

As UK ministers announced a review of the government's handling of the crisis, it emerged that the European commission wants every country to have a central database of horse movements, including through abattoirs.

Britain had a national database until ministers ended funding last September, and now leaves recording to 75 different bodies. The commission plans to introduce new EU rules on the identification of horses, ponies and donkeys within months. These will make a central database mandatory and cut the number of bodies empowered to issue passports.

David Heath, Britain's minister for agriculture and the environment, promised a wide-ranging review of the government's response over the past three months "to help restore confidence", but did not say what its response would be to the commission's plans.

He said only that a meeting of experts across the EU last week had been "a useful exchange of views in advance of further discussions at official level later this week".

The charity World Horse Welfare has previously said ministers have been aware of the weaknesses in the UK passport system and that a good central IT system is needed.

The Guardian revealed last week that 2% of all carcasses of horses sent for slaughter are found to contain the veterinary medicine bute – although since February they have not been allowed to leave abattoirs until test results have been delivered.

Details of the government's review will be published by the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, soon. Heath said police investigations into "completely unacceptable" food fraud were continuing, and said it was right that "any weaknesses in our food system and the controls it is subject to are identified and dealt with".

Mary Creagh, Labour's environment spokeswoman, said the present passport system was a mess and ministers' "short-sighted and reckless decision" to scrap the database last year had made it harder to track horses intended for the human food chain.

"Any new database must be compatible with Ireland and France if we are to have horses moving freely between our three countries," she said.

Last week Asda reported that its smart price corned beef had tested positive for very low levels of bute, which is banned from the human food chain. The corned beef had previously been found to contain horse DNA, and is the only product to test positive for bute since the scandal began.
Officials have said horsemeat containing bute at very low levels presents a very low risk to human health. Twenty-four products in the UK have been named as containing more than 1% horsemeat.
Last week the Netherlands recalled 50,000 tonnes of meat sold across Europe as beef over a two-year period which may contain horsemeat. A small number of UK businesses may have received products from a trading company selling the meat.

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Equine Welfare Alliance: US Horsemeat Banned in EU!

If Meat Plant Opens, Europeans Would Not Accept U.S. Product | Horse Back Magazine

If Meat Plant Opens, Europeans Would Not Accept U.S. Product
March 20, 2013

Mar 20, 2013 21:00 America/Chicago

Equine Welfare Alliance: US Horsemeat Banned in EU

CHICAGO, (EQUINE WELFARE ALLIANCE/PR Newswire) – Since Congress lifted the ban on USDA inspections of horse meat, several small shuttered cattle slaughter plants have clamored for the USDA to provide horse meat inspections. Ricardo De Los Santos of Valley Meats, a New Mexico plant, went as far as to sue the USDA for not providing the service. The attorney for Valley Meats has announced it will be opening in three weeks.

Unfortunately for those wishing to bring horse slaughter back to the US, they will have to do so without the ability to sell to the EU, the main market for US horse meat. The Equine Welfare Alliance has received confirmation from EU authorities that “by virtue of Commission decision 2011/163/EU the US is not authorized to export horsemeat to the EU.”

The decision was made in 2011, when the USDA neglected to comply with new regulations requiring submittal of a drug residue control program. Approval of such an application requires extensive review as well as audits and can take up to several years to complete.

The EU authority (SANCO) went on to say “Our Directorate General, up to now, does not record a recent residue monitoring plan on horse meat submitted by USDA.” In other words, the process has yet to begin.

The scandal over horse meat being substituted for beef in a myriad of products, as well as the finding of the banned drug phenylbutazone in some of those products has further dimmed the prospects for a lifting of the ban.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in an interview with Reuters, said sequestration could cause sporadic food shortages if inspectors aren’t available to examine meat, poultry and egg products. Obviously, providing inspectors for horse meat would further exacerbate the need to protect US consumers. Vilsack shocked many today when he was quoted as saying he hoped that Congress could come up with an alternative to horse slaughter.

EWA’s John Holland explains the bleak prospects for private horse slaughter plants in the US, saying “these plants will have no access to the markets even if the EU ban is lifted because the distribution is controlled by a few multi-nationals, and those expecting to contract with these companies should heed the story of Natural Valley Farms (SK Canada) which lost millions trying to do so.”

EWA is a dues free, all volunteer 501(c)(4) umbrella organization representing over 270 member organizations and 1,000 individual members worldwide in 18 countries.

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Horse Meat Scandal Illustrates Need for Federal Action

Michael Markarian: Animals & Politics: Horsemeat Scandal Illustrates Need for Federal Action

Horse meat Scandal Illustrates Need for Federal Action

A food scandal has rocked Europe, where products labeled as beef—everything from frozen lasagna to Swedish meatballs—have tested positive for horsemeat. But it’s not just in Europe where government officials should take notice; the controversy affects the United States, too. More than 100,000 American horses are killed each year for their meat, and the main market for this product is Europe.

Former racehorses, carriage horses, family ponies, and other equines are scooped up at auctions by predatory “killer buyers,” who often outbid horse rescue groups and families that want to give the horses a new, loving home. The majestic creatures are crammed tightly into cattle trucks, and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to slaughter plants across the border in Canada or Mexico.

They are butchered, shrink-wrapped, and air-freighted to Belgium, France, Italy, or other countries. It’s a grisly end for an American icon. And it’s generally reserved for the strongest, healthiest horses, with the most meat on their bones to fetch the most profit—not the sick and homeless as the horse slaughter boosters would have us believe.

Stopping the cruelty of long-distance transport and slaughter of our cherished companions should be enough to spur action. But there’s another major reason our lawmakers should act: We are dumping unsafe and contaminated horsemeat on European dinner plates and supermarket shelves.

The European Union forbids imports of American chicken because the carcasses are bathed in chlorine, and bans pork imports because American producers treat the animals with ractopomine. But tens of thousands of drugged-up American horses are entering the marketplace, even though they are routinely given medicines throughout their lives not intended for human consumption.

Clenbuterol, a bronchodilator with anabolic steroid properties, and Phenylbutazone, known as bute or horse aspirin, are among many commonly prescribed medications for treating ailing or lame horses—but banned for use in animals slaughtered for human consumption. The U.S. has no system in place to track the medications that are given to horses over their lifetimes, and therefore, there’s no reliable way to remove horses from the food chain once they have been given prohibited substances. It’s no surprise that bute was found last summer in horsemeat shipped from Canada to Belgium, and continues to turn up in random testing.

While horse slaughter apologists such as those in the Oklahoma legislature are rallying for a return to equine abattoirs on U.S. soil, it’s becoming uncertain whether they will have any remaining markets to sell their product—especially if the European Union decides to crack down on sales of horsemeat from North America in light of the recent scandal.

It’s time for the U.S. Congress to take a hard look at the serious and far-reaching food safety concerns associated with slaughtering American horses. Lawmakers should reintroduce federal legislation to prevent the slaughter and export of our horses for human consumption, and send a message that the global trade of U.S. horsemeat is simply unsuitable for the dinner table.

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Horse meat scandal latest: Are you eating frog poison? | UK | News | Daily Express

Horse meat scandal dominating the front pages (Photo credit: Gene Hunt)

Horse meat scandal latest: Are you eating frog poison? | UK | News | Daily Express

Horse meat scandal latest: Are you eating frog poison?

A POWERFUL painkiller made from the poison of jungle frogs is feared to have entered the food chain in contaminated horse meat.
By: Stuart Winter
Published: Sun, February 24, 2013

The-painkiller-is-made-from-the-poison-of-jungle-frogs The painkiller is made from the poison of jungle frogs

The drug, extracted from South American tree frogs and used to illegally dope racehorses so they can run when badly injured, joins a host of banned medicines that might be lurking in our food.

Animal welfare campaigners highlighted the threat of dermorphin or “tree frog juice” in the food chain last night when they called for a moratorium on horse meat being shipped into Europe from North America.

More than 100,000 horses are slaughtered there each year and sold to Europe but because of failings in the system there are questions over the meat reaching EU food standards.

Although the EU bans the presence of medicines in animals destined for the meat market, there are concerns that American carcasses contain drug residue because there are no requirements for their veterinary records to be shown at slaughter.

"We now know that criminals have passed off untraceable horse meat into products" Mary Creagh

Sport, working and companion horses from the United States are all killed for the European market. Recent scandals in the racing world, which have seen animals “nobbled” with drugs made from frog juice and even cobra venom, have raised the threat of illicit substances entering the food chain.

Earlier this month, the Sunday Express revealed how a racehorse treated with the painkiller phenylbutazone, known as bute, a drug linked to liver problems, may have been one of six horses that entered the food chain after being slaughtered in Britain.

The horse meat scandal shows no signs of abating, with Birds Eye removing a number of ready meals and a catering giant supplying schools, the Armed Forces and Ascot racecourse also withdrawing its beef.

There are now calls for a new round of checks on products for a wider number of contaminants. Shadow Environment Secretary Mary Creagh said: “We now know that criminals have passed off untraceable horse meat into products that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people have eaten over at least several months.

“The Government should order companies to test all products adulterated with horse meat to check that there is no risk to human health from any horse medication.”

The threat that “tree frog juice” has found its way on to the market was highlighted last week by Humane Society International. The animal welfare organisation is campaigning with its American partners for a moratorium on the sale of horse meat from across the North Atlantic.

It says there can be “no doubt that substantial numbers” of American horses sold to Europe have been administered with veterinary drugs, which is at odds with the lifetime ban on these substances for food animals.

There are concerns that American horse carcasses contain residue of the drug

Holly Hazard, of The Humane Society Of The United States, said: “There is virtually no horse racing around an American track or on exhibition in the show ring that has escaped a prescription for pain-masking drugs clearly prohibited for use in food animals under EU regulations.

“In addition, there is no way to track illegal substances such as dermorphin, routinely used by unscrupulous horse trainers to enhance performance, because laboratories wouldn’t even know to test for these drugs.

“Sport, working, companion and performance horses do not belong in the food supply as the meat simply cannot be guaranteed safe.”

The Food Standards Agency said: “We are assessing the need for any further veterinary medicine testing of both horses slaughtered in the UK and of horse meat found in food.”

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Call for EU to immediately ban horse meat from America

Call for EU to immediately ban horse meat from America - News - Horsetalk.co.nz

Call for EU to immediately ban horse meat from America

Call for EU to immediately ban horse meat from America
By Horsetalk.co.nz on Feb 12, 2013 in Just Briefly

Humane Society International is calling on European Union officials to protect consumer health and immediately ban the sale of horsemeat coming from North America.

Its call is in response in response to news reports that up to 100 per cent horsemeat has been found in Findus beef products marketed in France, Sweden and Britain.

“It is alarming to learn that European consumers may have fallen victim to large-scale food fraud, unwittingly consuming horse-meat products incorrectly labelled as beef,” the group’s European Union director, Jo Swabe, said.

“Consumer alarm is understandable as many people would ordinarily avoid eating horse flesh.

“Humane Society International calls on officials to acknowledge the potential risk to public health and safety, as this horsemeat could have originated from anywhere in the world, including from North America, and to immediately ban its sale from North America.”

The group argued there was a strong likelihood that some of the horsemeat had been imported into the EU from either Canada or Mexico. France, it said, was one of the biggest importers of North American horsemeat.

Most horse meat exported to the EU from both Canada and Mexico actually originates from United States horses shipped over the border.

France also receives horse-meat imports from other Member States, a proportion of which are actually re-exports from Canada and Mexico, too. In addition, French statistics show that a total 16,970 horses were slaughtered domestically during the same year.

There were significant concerns about horsemeat of US origin containing residues from veterinary drugs that in the EU are banned for use in animals killed for food, the society said.

It noted that recent audits conducted by the European Commission’s Food and Veterinary Office in Canada and Mexico have concluded that the medical treatment records for US horses are insufficient to guarantee that standards equivalent to those provided for by EU legislation are applied.

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US Horses Head Back to Canadian Killing Floor - National Horse | Examiner.com

US horses head back to Canadian killing floor - National horse | Examiner.com

Sales starting again at Fallon, NV Livestock Exchange

 US horses head back to Canadian killing floor

October 15, 2012
By: Laura Leigh

This morning doors to Canadian killing floors reopened to take American horses for export.

On Friday apparently an "incorrectly labelled" shipment arrived in France causing the temporary shutdown of US horses accepted for import into the European Union (EU).

The lack of complete information given to US kill buyers and auction houses led to them to believe that the shutdown was due to the new regulations pending on US horse meat. The regulations will require a "passport" system that certifies animals as drug free and in the care of the seller for at least six months. Those regulations will become enforced sometime between now and July of 2013.

Auction yards and trucks have resumed "business as usual."

The Fallon Livestock auction in Nevada has notified customers that the regular Tuesday sale of horses will take place tomorrow. Yesterday there was only one horse at the auction yard.

However operations resume with the knowledge that changes are coming.

"It is only a matter of time before the unsafe practices cause this so-called industry to reform," said Connie J. Cunningham of Wild Horse Education, "in America horses are not raised for food."

All of this has occurred while the Horse Slaughter Prevention Act sits idle in Congress, with so many other pieces of Legislation.


Laura is an award winning illustrator, animator, writer and videographer. Her articles on Wild Horses and Burros have appeared in numerous publications. Her documentation has appeared in such venues as The I-Team Reports of KLAS-TV and CNN.

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