Post by bryn on Mar 12, 2006 8:04:56 GMT -5
My friend Anne Russek sent this post to me. I have permission to crosspost.
I know John well too. I was a ghost writer of the piece many of you read about the Ramey double decker wreck in Indiana on September 15, 2004. I kept my name quiet since I was close by and John did some long distance sleuthing and put his name to the document. Here is Anne’s prologue and John’s piece.
From Anne: John Holland is a friend of mine from Viriginia who flew to Texas to witness
the town meeting concerning Dallas-Crown. This is his report of that trip.
For those of you unfamiliar with the names, Mary Nash is the woman who
started the anti horse slaughter movement. Her farm is next door to the
slaughhterhouse. Paula Bacon is the mayor of Kaufmann. Jerry Finch is the
founder of Habitat for Horses. Julie is a tireless crusader for the horses.
She regularly goes to slaughter auctions and documents the killl buyers and
all the rules they break that the USDA does not prosecute them for. You have
John's permission to cross post his story.
From John: I am glad you all enjoyed that wonderful news from Kaufman. Now let me
tell you a bit more about my experience.
The mayor of Kaufman is Paula Bacon. She was a close friend of Mary
Nash
(marynash.org) and is the most wonderful lady you can imagine. She was only
elected the first time by one vote, but was recently reelected. Her
opponents in her recent reelection got $20,000 for his to campaign, and she
got $1200 in small checks from all over the city and country. She said
that $1200 made the difference.
The town is deeply divided over the issue, and you dare not discuss it
openly in public. Mayor Bacon treated me like family and even picked me up
at the airport in Dallas and took me back to catch my plane home. Her
dream is to free Kaufman of the stigma, stench and corruption of the
slaughter plant and to make it a place people and businesses will want to
come.
Jerry Finch and Julie Caramante (Habitat for Horses) have been going to
Kaufman regularly to get video and to support the residents of the
neighborhood of Boggy Bottom. They and the mayor began working with Robert
Eldridge and the other residents and formed very close friendships. This
all led Don Feare to take the case for the residents pro-bono. Don is a
big wildlife and animal welfare advocate.
The decision to shut Dallas Crown down was based exclusively on the
evidence of their pollution and other nuisance violations, but the attorney
for Waldo complained bitterly that it was the hatred of outsiders to the
community that had made it happen. Ironically, he was quite correct but
that made no legal difference. They almost certainly could have covered
their dark deeds through the "good ole boy" network of the town, if it had
not been for the horse community. They had become so arrogant over the
years that they did not even pay the fines that the town issued. When the
town tried to take action, they simply got an immediate TRO (temporary
restraining order) and went on with business as usual. In the early
meetings they actually laughed and chuckled as the residents of boggy
bottom made their complaints. They were not laughing Thursday when their
karma blew back in their faces.
One of the most telling parts of the whole meeting was the fact that in
hours of jabbering on, the attorneys for Dallas Crown and Waldo never said
the word "horse" except when complaining about the outside influence of
horse lovers. The rest of the time they said "our business", "what we do",
"the service we provide", "our process", etc. I kept hearing "this thing
of ours"! The reason they would avoided these words obviously because they
knew how wrong horse slaughter is perceived to be by most Americans.
And I had the opportunity to see this evil first hand. Julie has been
filming the plant from outside for a very long time. It is possible to get
within feet of the kill box, with only a flimsy sheet-metal wall hiding the
horrors. You can hear the shrill whistles of the men driving the horses,
the clop of their hooves on metal grating, and the sickening snap of the
captive bolt gun. Then you hear the horse either drop or begin thrashing.
I can now say I know without a doubt that the stunning process is horridly
inhumane. One horse struggled for several minutes and you could hear the
gun going off time and time again as the man tried to hit its forehead. A
lot of horses were ineffectively stunned while I listened. The next time a
veterinarian says it is humane I will tell him to go stand by that kill box
before he speaks of what he does not know.
Dallas Crown recently built an expensive welded steel fence 8 foot high
all
the way around their property, but their property is very small and this
left the plant quite close to the wall. We were able to roam the adjoining
yards with total freedom as the residents welcomed the documentation of
their plight. Countless reporters and horse lovers had made this
pilgrimage before me.
Despite a brisk breeze, the stench was indescribable. The plant
sprayed
bleach almost continuously to try to cover the odor. The result was simply
to create a worse and more caustic odor that drifted for miles. The fence
worked very much to our advantage because they could not easily see our
approach. We put our video cameras on Julie's tripod and pushed the lens
up over the wall with the viewing screen tilted down. In this way the wall
acted to steady the camera and mask everything but the lens. I got
heartbreaking shots of the horses in the kill pens and others being
unloaded. One horse would not go up the ramp, and the worker got ever more
angry until he started beating him with his stick. He would never have
done this if he knew he was being filmed. I really must remember to thank
them for the fence.
They were killing more horses than Jerry and Julie had ever seen them
attempt. We counted at least four double-decker trailers. They started at
7 AM and about 10 AM the power went out. We were outside the kill box
where the hides come out on a conveyor and fall into a dumpster when
everything went silent and the conveyor stopped. The horse stuck in the
kill box began calling frantically to another horse in the kill shoot
behind him. It was heartbreaking to hear them talking to each other.
After a while we decided to get away for a while and come back later. When
we returned they were still killing. A few hours later we returned to our
motel to clean up for the meeting.
After the meeting Robert and his wife everyone over to their lovely
home
for pizza and beer. There were hugs all around as Julie replayed video of
the best moments of the meeting of the council. Robert's attorney Don
Feare was there and he was obviously and rightly proud of just how
completely he destroyed their attorney's attempts at stopping the board
from finally putting closure to the issue. Many of our friends from the
slaughter movement had been there for the meeting and many of us had just
met in person for the first time, so it was wonderful to have this time to
socialize.
The next morning Paula took Jerry, Julie, and me out to Mary Nash's
property where Paula is currently keeping her four wonderful horses. The
property is a beautiful patchwork of rolling pastures broken by tree lines
with natural arbor like gateways. The grass was lush and green and there
was a good sized pond whose many inlets snake around the rolling pasture.
As we walked back from the pond we came to two long parallel depressions in
the ground. Paula said that this was where Mary buried her two horses, and
where, at her own request, Mary's ashes had been scattered. I cannot
describe what a beautiful and peaceful place this was, nor how absolutely
perfect the day was as a warm gentle breeze blew into our faces cause our
eyes to tear at the corners.
I said that this property was the closest thing to horse heaven that I
had
ever seen when Paula pointed to the tree line and said the slaughter plant
was just beyond it. It was so close that she said the horses would often
become spooked by the cries from inside its rusting and blood soaked
confines.
At that moment, I felt like the Earth's poles of good and evil had been
converging here to do battle over the soul of the town of Kaufman. What an
incredible moment. It was impossible not to think of the movie "Lord of
the Rings". The parallels were just two compelling.
To think that just a few years ago, a black community had felt
powerless in
the shadow of a tormentor that assaulted their ears with the sounds of
killing, their air with that terrible stench, and even their sewers with so
much blood that it often backed up into their very bathtubs. And a white
woman, born to relative privilege, had kept her horses on an idyllic piece
of land just a short walk away. She had lived in a beautiful old
plantation style home but with all of this, she was at least as miserable
as her less fortunate neighbors. And a thin old man, looking the spitting
image of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons, had sat at a conference table in
Belgium far from the stench reviewing his company's ledgers filled with
neat clean columns of numbers. And all the rest of us had known little or
nothing about the plight of horses and went about our lives with no thought
of any of this.
Now the woman of privilege was gone with her life cut short after a
terrible fight with lung cancer, but she had changed everything. We stood
there telling her that the war she had fought so hard even while struggling
for her own life was finally turning. The old man was flying home no doubt
going over in his mind how he would explain to his keepers just how he had
let their cash cow slip through his gaunt fingers and what he intended to
do about it, and the residents of Boggy Bottom were allowing themselves a
brief time to rejoice while maintaining a harshly earned pessimism and
vowing to remain vigilant and ready to fight on. And through a thousand
optical fibers, satellites, and servers the news was spreading through the
internet of another tenuous but critical victory against the butchers of
our horses.
John Holland
Postscript from bryn: This will be my final post on SAFE. It is time for Kona and me to say Goodbye and Good Luck. bryn
I know John well too. I was a ghost writer of the piece many of you read about the Ramey double decker wreck in Indiana on September 15, 2004. I kept my name quiet since I was close by and John did some long distance sleuthing and put his name to the document. Here is Anne’s prologue and John’s piece.
From Anne: John Holland is a friend of mine from Viriginia who flew to Texas to witness
the town meeting concerning Dallas-Crown. This is his report of that trip.
For those of you unfamiliar with the names, Mary Nash is the woman who
started the anti horse slaughter movement. Her farm is next door to the
slaughhterhouse. Paula Bacon is the mayor of Kaufmann. Jerry Finch is the
founder of Habitat for Horses. Julie is a tireless crusader for the horses.
She regularly goes to slaughter auctions and documents the killl buyers and
all the rules they break that the USDA does not prosecute them for. You have
John's permission to cross post his story.
From John: I am glad you all enjoyed that wonderful news from Kaufman. Now let me
tell you a bit more about my experience.
The mayor of Kaufman is Paula Bacon. She was a close friend of Mary
Nash
(marynash.org) and is the most wonderful lady you can imagine. She was only
elected the first time by one vote, but was recently reelected. Her
opponents in her recent reelection got $20,000 for his to campaign, and she
got $1200 in small checks from all over the city and country. She said
that $1200 made the difference.
The town is deeply divided over the issue, and you dare not discuss it
openly in public. Mayor Bacon treated me like family and even picked me up
at the airport in Dallas and took me back to catch my plane home. Her
dream is to free Kaufman of the stigma, stench and corruption of the
slaughter plant and to make it a place people and businesses will want to
come.
Jerry Finch and Julie Caramante (Habitat for Horses) have been going to
Kaufman regularly to get video and to support the residents of the
neighborhood of Boggy Bottom. They and the mayor began working with Robert
Eldridge and the other residents and formed very close friendships. This
all led Don Feare to take the case for the residents pro-bono. Don is a
big wildlife and animal welfare advocate.
The decision to shut Dallas Crown down was based exclusively on the
evidence of their pollution and other nuisance violations, but the attorney
for Waldo complained bitterly that it was the hatred of outsiders to the
community that had made it happen. Ironically, he was quite correct but
that made no legal difference. They almost certainly could have covered
their dark deeds through the "good ole boy" network of the town, if it had
not been for the horse community. They had become so arrogant over the
years that they did not even pay the fines that the town issued. When the
town tried to take action, they simply got an immediate TRO (temporary
restraining order) and went on with business as usual. In the early
meetings they actually laughed and chuckled as the residents of boggy
bottom made their complaints. They were not laughing Thursday when their
karma blew back in their faces.
One of the most telling parts of the whole meeting was the fact that in
hours of jabbering on, the attorneys for Dallas Crown and Waldo never said
the word "horse" except when complaining about the outside influence of
horse lovers. The rest of the time they said "our business", "what we do",
"the service we provide", "our process", etc. I kept hearing "this thing
of ours"! The reason they would avoided these words obviously because they
knew how wrong horse slaughter is perceived to be by most Americans.
And I had the opportunity to see this evil first hand. Julie has been
filming the plant from outside for a very long time. It is possible to get
within feet of the kill box, with only a flimsy sheet-metal wall hiding the
horrors. You can hear the shrill whistles of the men driving the horses,
the clop of their hooves on metal grating, and the sickening snap of the
captive bolt gun. Then you hear the horse either drop or begin thrashing.
I can now say I know without a doubt that the stunning process is horridly
inhumane. One horse struggled for several minutes and you could hear the
gun going off time and time again as the man tried to hit its forehead. A
lot of horses were ineffectively stunned while I listened. The next time a
veterinarian says it is humane I will tell him to go stand by that kill box
before he speaks of what he does not know.
Dallas Crown recently built an expensive welded steel fence 8 foot high
all
the way around their property, but their property is very small and this
left the plant quite close to the wall. We were able to roam the adjoining
yards with total freedom as the residents welcomed the documentation of
their plight. Countless reporters and horse lovers had made this
pilgrimage before me.
Despite a brisk breeze, the stench was indescribable. The plant
sprayed
bleach almost continuously to try to cover the odor. The result was simply
to create a worse and more caustic odor that drifted for miles. The fence
worked very much to our advantage because they could not easily see our
approach. We put our video cameras on Julie's tripod and pushed the lens
up over the wall with the viewing screen tilted down. In this way the wall
acted to steady the camera and mask everything but the lens. I got
heartbreaking shots of the horses in the kill pens and others being
unloaded. One horse would not go up the ramp, and the worker got ever more
angry until he started beating him with his stick. He would never have
done this if he knew he was being filmed. I really must remember to thank
them for the fence.
They were killing more horses than Jerry and Julie had ever seen them
attempt. We counted at least four double-decker trailers. They started at
7 AM and about 10 AM the power went out. We were outside the kill box
where the hides come out on a conveyor and fall into a dumpster when
everything went silent and the conveyor stopped. The horse stuck in the
kill box began calling frantically to another horse in the kill shoot
behind him. It was heartbreaking to hear them talking to each other.
After a while we decided to get away for a while and come back later. When
we returned they were still killing. A few hours later we returned to our
motel to clean up for the meeting.
After the meeting Robert and his wife everyone over to their lovely
home
for pizza and beer. There were hugs all around as Julie replayed video of
the best moments of the meeting of the council. Robert's attorney Don
Feare was there and he was obviously and rightly proud of just how
completely he destroyed their attorney's attempts at stopping the board
from finally putting closure to the issue. Many of our friends from the
slaughter movement had been there for the meeting and many of us had just
met in person for the first time, so it was wonderful to have this time to
socialize.
The next morning Paula took Jerry, Julie, and me out to Mary Nash's
property where Paula is currently keeping her four wonderful horses. The
property is a beautiful patchwork of rolling pastures broken by tree lines
with natural arbor like gateways. The grass was lush and green and there
was a good sized pond whose many inlets snake around the rolling pasture.
As we walked back from the pond we came to two long parallel depressions in
the ground. Paula said that this was where Mary buried her two horses, and
where, at her own request, Mary's ashes had been scattered. I cannot
describe what a beautiful and peaceful place this was, nor how absolutely
perfect the day was as a warm gentle breeze blew into our faces cause our
eyes to tear at the corners.
I said that this property was the closest thing to horse heaven that I
had
ever seen when Paula pointed to the tree line and said the slaughter plant
was just beyond it. It was so close that she said the horses would often
become spooked by the cries from inside its rusting and blood soaked
confines.
At that moment, I felt like the Earth's poles of good and evil had been
converging here to do battle over the soul of the town of Kaufman. What an
incredible moment. It was impossible not to think of the movie "Lord of
the Rings". The parallels were just two compelling.
To think that just a few years ago, a black community had felt
powerless in
the shadow of a tormentor that assaulted their ears with the sounds of
killing, their air with that terrible stench, and even their sewers with so
much blood that it often backed up into their very bathtubs. And a white
woman, born to relative privilege, had kept her horses on an idyllic piece
of land just a short walk away. She had lived in a beautiful old
plantation style home but with all of this, she was at least as miserable
as her less fortunate neighbors. And a thin old man, looking the spitting
image of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons, had sat at a conference table in
Belgium far from the stench reviewing his company's ledgers filled with
neat clean columns of numbers. And all the rest of us had known little or
nothing about the plight of horses and went about our lives with no thought
of any of this.
Now the woman of privilege was gone with her life cut short after a
terrible fight with lung cancer, but she had changed everything. We stood
there telling her that the war she had fought so hard even while struggling
for her own life was finally turning. The old man was flying home no doubt
going over in his mind how he would explain to his keepers just how he had
let their cash cow slip through his gaunt fingers and what he intended to
do about it, and the residents of Boggy Bottom were allowing themselves a
brief time to rejoice while maintaining a harshly earned pessimism and
vowing to remain vigilant and ready to fight on. And through a thousand
optical fibers, satellites, and servers the news was spreading through the
internet of another tenuous but critical victory against the butchers of
our horses.
John Holland
Postscript from bryn: This will be my final post on SAFE. It is time for Kona and me to say Goodbye and Good Luck. bryn