Horses to the slaughter

Horses to the slaughter  | Salon

U.S. horses are meeting gruesome ends abroad, while the debate rages on: Are horses 1,500 pounds of food or friend?

EL PASO, Texas — On the dusty outskirts of this border city, neighbored by truck stops and desert scrub, hundreds of horses mill around a sprawling grid of pens at the Rio Grand Classic horse auction. Inside the metal sale barn, a cowboy rides a handsome palomino into the show ring, and the auctioneer’s chant crescendos as the price rises into the thousands. But the bidding on some horses is less enthusiastic. These horses — plump young pintos, old red roans, a scrawny mare and her wobbly-legged foal — dart around the show ring nervously before selling for a few hundred dollars or less. Then they’re shuffled into the “kill pen,” a set of crowded corrals at the edge of the auction property. There, all but the foal are marked with green U.S. Department of Agriculture tags that designate horses bought for slaughter, most likely in Mexico, where the meat is consumed and sold abroad.

Not many people realize slaughtering horses for meat has been big business in the U.S. for generations. Yet in recent decades, public sentiment, matched by state and local laws, has risen against the practice, and in 2007 the last three U.S. horse slaughterhouses were shuttered. Since 2005, Congress has also withheld U.S. Department of Agriculture funding for horse-meat inspections to prevent new abattoirs from opening in states where horse slaughter is still legal. No federal law, though, forbids U.S. horses from being sent to slaughterhouses across the border. Which is exactly what has been happening in the two years since horse slaughter stopped here. The number killed in Canada and Mexico doubled to 49,000 in 2007 and rose to more than 72,000 last year, according to trade data.

via Horses to the slaughter | Salon.