Connecticut is a hell of a horse-loving state, with more noble steeds (nearly 52,000 by one count) than any of our New England neighbors. So many around here were glad when the last U.S. horse-slaughtering plant was shut down four years ago in Illinois.
Except there were some brutal unintended consequences. Last year, an estimated 138,000 U.S. horses were shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter, often after grueling journeys lasting hundreds or thousands of miles. No one knows how many other horses were abandoned or starved to death in this country when their recession-hammered owners were no longer able to care for them.
Those facts and heavy lobbying by some pro-slaughter groups finally convinced Congress to approve legislation that will clear the way for horse-meat processing plants to once again operate in this country. President Obama signed that budget bill into law on Nov. 18. Many animal welfare activists are outraged and warn the result will — literally — be wholesale slaughter.
The federal legislation apparently leaves it up to the individual states to decide whether to authorize horse slaughter houses within their borders. “We don’t know how that’s going to play out,” Connecticut Department of Agriculture spokesman George Krivda says of the possibility that one of those operations could be opened here.
“It’s a very delicate issue, an emotional issue,” says Krivda. “People have a great deal of affection for horses.” And those feelings are far different than the general public’s attitudes toward traditional food animals like cattle, chickens and hogs, he adds.
In places like France and Belgium, horse meat is still considered a potential dinner item, as it was in some areas of the United States as recently as the 1940s. Years ago, there was at least one horse auction in Connecticut where buyers for processing plants would come to bid for animals for slaughter.
Since the closure of the U.S. slaughtering operations, Connecticut has faced the complex problem of what to do with unwanted horses.
“We have seen, especially with the downturn in the economy, horses that may have been candidates for slaughter that have been left to starve,” Krivda says. The state stable used to care for horses seized in animal-cruelty cases is nearly at capacity, as are private horse rescue operations around Connecticut.
Just last week, a Wethersfield farmer was charged with animal cruelty in a case where state officials seized two starving, emaciated horses from his property. One was so bad off that it had to be killed; the other was sent to a horse rescue program.
Krivda says many people in agriculture believe sending those animals to a processing plant would be “far more humane than letting them starve to death.”
“We don’t believe in slaughter,” says Patty Wahler, head of a horse rescue farm in Washington, Connecticut. She also knows there is a strong argument that “taking [unwanted horses] to Mexico and Canada is more inhumane than slaughtering them here.”
“As long as people have horses that they don’t take care of and no longer care for, it’s going to continue,” Wahler says of the problem of unwanted horses.
The alternative to having an old, dying or unwanted horse slaughtered in a processing plant is to have it “put down” and bury or compost it in compliance with state and local health regulations. Or you could have it cremated.
Connecticut Horse Cremation in Durham has been in operation since July, and (for $1,500) will pick up the body of your horse, transport it, cremate it and dispose of the ashes for you, according to Jeff Blaschke, one of the owners. (If you want the ashes back, it will cost you $1,600, and to have them in an urn shaped like a tack box, the price would be $1,700.)
“We’re adamant about treating a horse with dignity,” says Blaschke. “It’s very gentle on the horse, very gentle on the owner.”
Blaschke owns his own draft horses and is involved in a horse rescue operation that regularly goes down to buy animals from the “kill pens” in New Jersey and Pennsylvania where horses are collected for shipment to Mexico or Canada.
“It’s not so much how horses die, it’s how they treat them,” says Blaschke. “It’s horrible, horrible the things they do to these horses.” He says sick and weak animals are often shipped for slaughter without proper food or water or care of any sort.
Blaschke doesn’t buy the argument that it would be more humane to have such animals sent for slaughter at U.S. processing plants than to have them endure long trips to other countries to be killed:
“I don’t think it will be any more humane – it will be the same treatment.”
