Horse Slaughtering

In 1956 an ex-plow horse on his way to the dog food factory, caught the eye of Harry Deleyer, a famous horse trainer and rider. Deleyer paid eighty dollars for the young gray horse, which would soon make history. After becoming a lesson horse for his students to learn to ride, Deleyer recognized Snowman’s potential and began training him as a jumper. Soon snowman was the “American horse show association horse of the year in 1958 and 1959 and was induced in to the National show jumping hall of fame in 1992.” (Snowman) Snowman’s rags-to- riches story could have ended quite differently if Harry Deleyer hadn’t come to his rescue. It is hard to believe that such a talented horse as Snowman barely escaped being turned in to dog food. Like Snowman, thousands of healthy, talented horses are sent to slaughter each year.

Horses have served humans throughout history, carrying people into battle, pulling plows in our fields so we could grow our crops, and being a faithful companion, yet they are being turned into meat and sold in France, Belgium, Holland, Japan and Italy. As indicated in a recent study “around 100,000 horses are slaughtered each year in the United States alone and thousands more are sent out of the country to be slaughtered.” (Meszoly,) This outrageous number should not exist because the manor in which horses are slaughter and transported to slaughter should be considered animal cruelty; also the overpopulation problem can be fixed by taking simple measures to control the country’s horse population. Also the carelessness of auctions serves as a resource for kill buyers, and the working conditions in side the slaughterhouse are unsafe for the workers.

The way that horses are slaughtered and transported to slaughter borders the line to animal cruelty. As Jennifer Hurley said in her book Animal Rights, “through-out their brief, sad lives animals raised for food are subject to barbaric treatment.” (Hurley, pg37.) Although the Humane Slaughter Act protects animals during slaughter it does not serve any legal justification over the transportation of the animals, which allows the Horses to be hauled in double-decker trucks intended for hauling cattle, causing the horses to acquire head injuries, (Beckoff, 335.) but also many of the horses are sick or injured before even being loaded, then they are hauled for hours without rest stops or water.

Once the horses reach the slaughterhouse “the horses are left in the packed trailers, where downed animals are unable to rise,” (Betraying Our Equine Ally). Once the animals are unloaded workers with electric prods force them into kill boxes, where the horses are stunned using a captive-bolt gun, which fires a retractable metal rod into the animals in hopes of rendering the horse unconscious, head according to Warrik, pg 68. This is done because Under the Humane Slaughter Act the animals must be unconscious before they are slaughtered. However if the captive-bolt is not done properly, as in many cases the horses is slaughters alive by being hung by their back leg and having their throat slit.

People who are not involved with horses are not aware of this problem and most people don’t even know that the family dog eats horsemeat in their food every night. Understanding that we can’t allow horses to over populate the land because it will have a trickle down effect on other the animals, but there are other ways to handle the growing population, without the use of slaughterhouses. Although many people feel that horse slaughter is the only answer to the country’s overpopulation problem, the reality is that there are other ways to manage the 100,000 excess horses in the country each year.

First of all there would not be such an excess of horses if there weren’t 75,000 mares used to produce Premarin each year. Premarin is made from pregnant mares urine and is used as estrogen replacement therapy for women. “The female horses are kept pregnant and confined, then after giving birth the foals are destroyed because they can’t be used to produce Premarin.” (Laucella, pg 31.) According to Goldstein (1998), Premarin is the most widely prescribed estrogen pill in the United States and has been on the market since 1941. This means that ever year from 1941to 2007, 77, 000 unwanted foals are sent to slaughter each year, a large number that could be reduced to zero, if women simple chose to use plant replacement therapy instead of animal. An animal rights organization recently did a study that for “every 150 women who decided not to use Premarin one less mare would be used.” (pearson, pg 24).

Another way to control the overpopulation issue is to manage the number of wild horses. “In the 1950s Velma Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie,” began a campaign to protect wild horses from this slaughter. Her work culminated in the passage of The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act