Editor’s Note: A version of this article was posted at 2:18 p.m., before the editing process was complete. It was replaced with the correct version at 6:06.
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer-prize winning author whose work is included in “To the Swift: Classic Triple Crown Horses and Their Race for Glory” (St. Martin’s Press), edited by Joe Drape.
I think it’s time that we talk honestly about the slaughter of horses. On Thursday, William C. Rhoden had a piece in the Times pointing out that more racehorses die at the slaughterhouse than on the racetrack, but he didn’t talk about the alternatives. Few who are anti-slaughter do, even veterinarians, because horse slaughter is a very tricky issue, much trickier, say, than factory farms for chickens or slaughter conditions for beef cattle or even for veal calves. We don’t like to think of a horse, who has been trained to perform or treated as a pet or won a lot of money being slaughtered in terrifying conditions in order that some Germans or some French people might eat horse meat. Would it be different if it were starving children in some third-world country eating the meat? I don’t know.
But here are the issues: the average horse lives between 25 and 30 years and weighs 900 to 1,600 pounds. Thoroughbreds constitute one segment of the population of horses — there are also quarter horses (used for racing, pleasure riding, and ranch work), American saddlebreds, used for riding, driving, and showing, Tennessee walkers (ditto), warmbloods (used for jumping, dressage, driving), various draft breeds and ponies. Because a horse lives such a long time and is expensive to keep, horses are at the mercy of their owners. A lucky horse is one who lives a long, useful, healthy, and well-fed life, with room to roam, grass to eat, and an owner who understands and appreciates him, then, once he is in pain or having difficulties because of old age, has the money to euthanize him and — do what? Bury him? Illegal in most places. Cremate him? A cremated horse takes up 10 human-sized boxes. Send him to the rendering plant? Horse byproducts have some value (they used to have more—glue, horsehair, horse-hide, horse meat).
Sandra Blakeslee described rendering in the Times in 1997 (Mar 11) as “the ancient but seldom-discussed practice of boiling down and making feed meal and other products out of slaughterhouse and restaurant scraps, dead farm animals, road kill and — distasteful as it may seem — cats and dogs euthanized in some animal shelters. Rendering plants produce tallow, bonemeal, fat, and powdered animal protein. There are two possibilities for a dead horse — his body can be treated as if he were human (I did know a woman who had her horse cremated and kept the 10 boxes in her house) or it can be treated as animals are, and go to the rendering plant. You cannot discuss horse slaughter without discussing horse corpses. Horse slaughter makes use of horse corpses.
When I was 14 and my horse broke her leg when she slipped and fell in a patch of mud, she was sent to a foxhunting kennel, euthanized by electrocution (hot wire on the head, steel shoe on the foot), butchered, and fed to the foxhounds. Even at 14, though I was distraught because I loved and missed the horse, I recognized that there was a justice and a rightness about this solution to the problem of the disposal of the horse. She could not walk, she could not be healed, her death was as merciful as we could make it, and her recycling fed hounds who would otherwise eat some other animal.
The horse I rode when I was 14 was a retired racehorse, retrained to jump and gallop cross-country. She was beautiful, and her career was fairly common then — most Americans who liked to ride English rode retired racehorses, and many racehorses trainers had some sort of connection to the equestrian world. Thoroughbreds were prized — they were beautiful and athletic. Even the not very speedy ones excelled at sport.
Beginning in the 70s, though, Europeans began exporting specialized sporthorses to the United States known as “warmbloods.” They were bred in government-sponsored programs — crosses between various draft breeds and thoroughbreds intended to be larger, easier to manage, and more geared to a life spent doing dressage and jumping. The warmblood industry in Europe is well organized and well developed, and horses sent to the United States have in large part replaced Thoroughbreds as status symbols and showhorses. Someone like myself, who prefers riding thoroughbreds, is in the distinct minority, and most race horse trainers do not know show horse people. In addition, most showhorse people have lost the expertise they once had in retraining racehorses. The result is that while there are more racehorses than there were in the 60s (also more venues for racing and more races), the aftermarket for racehorses is quite small and disorganized. The Europeans have made strong connections with American showhorse trainers, the trainers have learned to work with a different type of animal, and riding has changed, too. The result is a huge number of extra horses — not only thoroughbreds, but warmbloods who are past their useful prime. And that is only on the English riding side. Western riding horses abound, too.
But the U.S., while breeding an abundance of horses, has not made any provision for their disposal. Anti-slaughter activists would like all excess horses to be cared for, but have not designated who would pay what Robert Lawrence of the Equine Industry Program at the University of Louisville estimates to be $400 million dollars a year. A few years ago, an anti-slaughter bill was passed in California. The result was just as veterinarians opposed to the bill feared. Horses were still sent to slaughter — only they had farther to travel (Mexico and Canada as opposed to Texas) and they traveled in worse conditions. Many other horses (as the veterinarians also feared) were simply left to starve when their owners could no longer feed them, since euthanizing and rendering cost money that an owner may not have. And abandonment is a problem that has burgeoned since the beginning of the current recession. Last fall, a certain town in Northern California announced that horses could be brought to town on a certain Saturday for no-questions-asked euthanization. It was the most merciful thing to do.
Well-meaning commentators such as Mr. Rhoden can wish away horse slaughter (or even horse racing), but I think it would be far better to regulate horse transportation and institute methods of humane slaughter such as those proposed by Temple Grandin for cattle. We must recognize that there is a market for horse meat (not only for human consumption, but also for zoo and circus-animal consumption) and that in a starving world, a source of protein should not go to waste for sentimental reasons. It is sentimentality that has resulted in profounder cruelty to our horses — because we don’t accept that they are animals and have a utilitarian purpose, we hide from what happens to them, and so what happens to them happens in secret.
Comments are no longer being accepted.