Post by diamondindykin on Sept 21, 2006 16:52:09 GMT -5
By JOSH HARKINSON
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is reprinted with permission of E/The Environmental Magazine, www.emagazine.com. The Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (H.R. 503) passed the U.S. House on Sept. 7. The Senate is expected to vote in November on the bill, which is opposed by, among others, R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America, based in Billings. R-CALF President Chuck Kiker says, “Horses are the private property of ranchers and cattle farmers all across this country, and under the free-enterprise system this nation was founded on, horse owners should be able to maintain their right to dispose of their private property as they see fit.”
On a prominent hillock above Kaufman’s main highway, the corrugated metal facade of the Dallas Crown slaughterhouse announced itself without a sign. Its herald was borne on the wind – a simultaneously musky and astringent odor of horse fur, chlorine, feces and blood.
Finch, whose white moustache lightens a red leathery face, lumbered past the plant and down a side street in a jacked-up Dodge Ram that could be straight off any Texas back 40. He grew up in Amarillo, where he worked summers at a riding stable rounding up steeds.
“It was just the best damn job in the world,” he says. College led Finch out of the pasture and into a sales job in the Houston suburbs, but not to happiness. In 1995 he retired early, bought a ranch and rekindled his passion for riding animals. He now operates Habitat for Horses, the largest equine rescue group in the South.
Finch guarded his pickup as two fellow activists, lugging cameras and tripods, bushwacked through hackberry trees, past junked cars and into a clearing along the edge of Dallas Crown’s perimeter. John Holland, a computer programmer from Virginia, raised his camcorder just over the top of a metal barricade and stared up at the small video screen. It showed a healthy-looking herd draping heads over a fence. After a few minutes, a worker yelled “Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!” and spooked them into a chute. He whipped a stubborn straggler in the rump. “That’s one smart horse,” Holland said as he zoomed the camera. “I hope he kicks the crap out of that guy.”
The activists were filming Dallas Crown in the hope that the footage would fan public outrage over horse slaughter. If it does, it won’t be the first time that the idea of eating Silver or Mr. Ed has irked the Texan temperament. A nearly forgotten state statute dating to 1949 prohibits the slaughter of horses for human consumption. In fact, the law gained new prominence in 2002 when attorney general John Cornyn ruled it legal. But last year U.S. District Judge Terry Means found federal law superseded the old slaughter ban. An appeal is pending.
According to court records, the plants last year sold a total of 1,750 tons of meat to U.S. zoos, and exported another 17,000 tons for human consumption.
A campaign to outlaw horse slaughter last year at the federal level was bolstered by polls showing 70 to 90 percent of Americans opposed killing horses for meat. Some congressional offices received more calls in favor of a proposed U.S. slaughter ban than they did regarding the recent Supreme Court nominations or Hurricane Katrina. One Senate office, fielding a call every six minutes, begged a Humane Society lobbyist to ward off the siege. “They couldn’t function,” she says.
A similar upwelling of public support pushed through a 1998 ballot measure banning horse slaughter in California. Dick Schumacher, president of the California Veterinary Medical Association at the time, attributes the move to a shift in public perceptions of horses.
“They are now seen less as livestock,” he said, “and more as pets.”
Last year’s national anti-slaughter campaign helped pass a federal spending bill in November that should have already closed the plants, slaughter foes say. H.R. 2744 removed funding for U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) inspectors who must by law supervise the slaughterhouses. Yet the USDA recently bypassed the roadblock by allowing the plants to continue operating under the watch of inspectors paid with private funds. Last March, a U.S. District Court upheld the decision. The Humane Society is weighing an appeal.
Although they say they have nothing to hide, none of the slaughterhouses have allowed activists or the press inside. E had tentatively set up such a visit, but it was vetoed by the plants’ European owners.
“We’re a little concerned about the purpose of someone coming there,” says Dallas Crown attorney Mark Calabria. “If it’s simply to run us down or paint us in a bad light, we don’t really see the need to open the door.”
Finch led his video crew around the plant, past a half dozen snarling, chained rottweilers, to a tangle of pipes and vents. Misters sprayed deodorizer that did little to mask the stink of intestines. From inside a narrow cinderblock structure came an occasional chain rattle, whinny and thud. This was the plant’s “kill room.”
Many horses here suffer horribly painful deaths, Finch believes. A gun with a retractable spike, known as a “captive bolt,” is supposed to fell the animals in one quick jolt to the brain. But two different workers kill horses for the plant on different days and Finch often hears one of them shoot the bolt repeatedly. “The Thursday guy is good,” he said. “The Monday guy is terrible.”
U.S. and European regulations ensure the horses are killed humanely, said Brent Gattis, a spokesperson for the slaughterhouses. “Although I am told by the plants that they haven’t had any problems with ‘missing,’ or however you want to say that, the Europeans require them to have an extra captive bolt at the ready just in case there is a problem,” he says.
Whatever happens inside the plant, there’s little dispute that slaughtering a large animal can be nasty. Angling out of the kill room and over a puddle of blood, a conveyor belt carried a freshly stripped-off horse pelt, turning it over the lip of a dumpster in a bundle of ear, skin and tail. The scene was a stone’s throw from the backyard of a house where children played.
Robert Eldridge, a homeowner who lives downwind of the plant, joined Finch at the fence line. Eldridge and many other residents of the predominately black, Boggy Bottom neighborhood have lived next to the facility since it opened as a cattle slaughterhouse in 1954. Thirty-two years later it was retrofitted to accept horses. A log kept by neighbor Edward Caves, who has since passed away, reported horse parts along the road, green fly infestations in his home and frequently noted, “Had odors for breakfast.”
In 2004, the plant was cited for 31 separate wastewater violations. “These people don’t care about anything but making money,” Eldridge said over the hum of the conveyor belt. “Anybody else is just a piece of trash.”
But even if the plant cleaned up its act, Finch wouldn’t be satisfied. His opposition to the slaughterhouse is grounded in a visceral sense that eating a horse violates a nearly spiritual relationship between man and beast, and that horses and humans have forged a sacred trust based on mutual aid and an intuitive bond. “Horses know us better than we do sometimes,” he says. “They know our feelings, our emotions. So my issue with this whole slaughter thing is: it’s just a deep betrayal by us.”
Josh Harkinson, a former E intern, is a reporter for the Houston Press. This article was prepared in cooperation with that paper, which ran it simultaneously.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is reprinted with permission of E/The Environmental Magazine, www.emagazine.com. The Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (H.R. 503) passed the U.S. House on Sept. 7. The Senate is expected to vote in November on the bill, which is opposed by, among others, R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America, based in Billings. R-CALF President Chuck Kiker says, “Horses are the private property of ranchers and cattle farmers all across this country, and under the free-enterprise system this nation was founded on, horse owners should be able to maintain their right to dispose of their private property as they see fit.”
On a prominent hillock above Kaufman’s main highway, the corrugated metal facade of the Dallas Crown slaughterhouse announced itself without a sign. Its herald was borne on the wind – a simultaneously musky and astringent odor of horse fur, chlorine, feces and blood.
Finch, whose white moustache lightens a red leathery face, lumbered past the plant and down a side street in a jacked-up Dodge Ram that could be straight off any Texas back 40. He grew up in Amarillo, where he worked summers at a riding stable rounding up steeds.
“It was just the best damn job in the world,” he says. College led Finch out of the pasture and into a sales job in the Houston suburbs, but not to happiness. In 1995 he retired early, bought a ranch and rekindled his passion for riding animals. He now operates Habitat for Horses, the largest equine rescue group in the South.
Finch guarded his pickup as two fellow activists, lugging cameras and tripods, bushwacked through hackberry trees, past junked cars and into a clearing along the edge of Dallas Crown’s perimeter. John Holland, a computer programmer from Virginia, raised his camcorder just over the top of a metal barricade and stared up at the small video screen. It showed a healthy-looking herd draping heads over a fence. After a few minutes, a worker yelled “Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!” and spooked them into a chute. He whipped a stubborn straggler in the rump. “That’s one smart horse,” Holland said as he zoomed the camera. “I hope he kicks the crap out of that guy.”
The activists were filming Dallas Crown in the hope that the footage would fan public outrage over horse slaughter. If it does, it won’t be the first time that the idea of eating Silver or Mr. Ed has irked the Texan temperament. A nearly forgotten state statute dating to 1949 prohibits the slaughter of horses for human consumption. In fact, the law gained new prominence in 2002 when attorney general John Cornyn ruled it legal. But last year U.S. District Judge Terry Means found federal law superseded the old slaughter ban. An appeal is pending.
According to court records, the plants last year sold a total of 1,750 tons of meat to U.S. zoos, and exported another 17,000 tons for human consumption.
A campaign to outlaw horse slaughter last year at the federal level was bolstered by polls showing 70 to 90 percent of Americans opposed killing horses for meat. Some congressional offices received more calls in favor of a proposed U.S. slaughter ban than they did regarding the recent Supreme Court nominations or Hurricane Katrina. One Senate office, fielding a call every six minutes, begged a Humane Society lobbyist to ward off the siege. “They couldn’t function,” she says.
A similar upwelling of public support pushed through a 1998 ballot measure banning horse slaughter in California. Dick Schumacher, president of the California Veterinary Medical Association at the time, attributes the move to a shift in public perceptions of horses.
“They are now seen less as livestock,” he said, “and more as pets.”
Last year’s national anti-slaughter campaign helped pass a federal spending bill in November that should have already closed the plants, slaughter foes say. H.R. 2744 removed funding for U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) inspectors who must by law supervise the slaughterhouses. Yet the USDA recently bypassed the roadblock by allowing the plants to continue operating under the watch of inspectors paid with private funds. Last March, a U.S. District Court upheld the decision. The Humane Society is weighing an appeal.
Although they say they have nothing to hide, none of the slaughterhouses have allowed activists or the press inside. E had tentatively set up such a visit, but it was vetoed by the plants’ European owners.
“We’re a little concerned about the purpose of someone coming there,” says Dallas Crown attorney Mark Calabria. “If it’s simply to run us down or paint us in a bad light, we don’t really see the need to open the door.”
Finch led his video crew around the plant, past a half dozen snarling, chained rottweilers, to a tangle of pipes and vents. Misters sprayed deodorizer that did little to mask the stink of intestines. From inside a narrow cinderblock structure came an occasional chain rattle, whinny and thud. This was the plant’s “kill room.”
Many horses here suffer horribly painful deaths, Finch believes. A gun with a retractable spike, known as a “captive bolt,” is supposed to fell the animals in one quick jolt to the brain. But two different workers kill horses for the plant on different days and Finch often hears one of them shoot the bolt repeatedly. “The Thursday guy is good,” he said. “The Monday guy is terrible.”
U.S. and European regulations ensure the horses are killed humanely, said Brent Gattis, a spokesperson for the slaughterhouses. “Although I am told by the plants that they haven’t had any problems with ‘missing,’ or however you want to say that, the Europeans require them to have an extra captive bolt at the ready just in case there is a problem,” he says.
Whatever happens inside the plant, there’s little dispute that slaughtering a large animal can be nasty. Angling out of the kill room and over a puddle of blood, a conveyor belt carried a freshly stripped-off horse pelt, turning it over the lip of a dumpster in a bundle of ear, skin and tail. The scene was a stone’s throw from the backyard of a house where children played.
Robert Eldridge, a homeowner who lives downwind of the plant, joined Finch at the fence line. Eldridge and many other residents of the predominately black, Boggy Bottom neighborhood have lived next to the facility since it opened as a cattle slaughterhouse in 1954. Thirty-two years later it was retrofitted to accept horses. A log kept by neighbor Edward Caves, who has since passed away, reported horse parts along the road, green fly infestations in his home and frequently noted, “Had odors for breakfast.”
In 2004, the plant was cited for 31 separate wastewater violations. “These people don’t care about anything but making money,” Eldridge said over the hum of the conveyor belt. “Anybody else is just a piece of trash.”
But even if the plant cleaned up its act, Finch wouldn’t be satisfied. His opposition to the slaughterhouse is grounded in a visceral sense that eating a horse violates a nearly spiritual relationship between man and beast, and that horses and humans have forged a sacred trust based on mutual aid and an intuitive bond. “Horses know us better than we do sometimes,” he says. “They know our feelings, our emotions. So my issue with this whole slaughter thing is: it’s just a deep betrayal by us.”
Josh Harkinson, a former E intern, is a reporter for the Houston Press. This article was prepared in cooperation with that paper, which ran it simultaneously.