Into Uncharted Territory
You probably know that last year's closure of the U.S. horse slaughter plants did not keep U.S. horses from being slaughtered, but instead outsourced slaughter to Canada and Mexico.
You also may know that Congress is considering legislation that would ban transport of horses bound for (or even suspected of being bound for) slaughter in foreign countries--closing the doors, in effect, to abbatoirs.
What you may not know is that this would make the U.S. horse economy the first and only one in history--dating back to the dawn of man's deliberate taming and employment of the horse--to be forced to operate with no floor in value whatsoever. The FREE horse would become the new base standard against which horses offered for sale would compete (something that's already underway). The horse would become the only form of livestock to have no salvage value for meat, hoof, hide, horn, or feathers. (Ever see ads for "free cow"?)
There's a huge paradigm shift in that. None of us has ever experienced, or even heard stories told, of a horse culture and economy, that not have this level of value as its basis. For horsedom, the world has always been flat.
Unchartered waters...right up over the horizon. Where the New World will have an utterly different shape than the old.
I've often wondered what it must have been like to have been a horseperson in the early years of the 20th century. Then, the explosive spread of the automobile made horses obsolete, plunging the horse population from 20 million to 2 million in less than 20 years. Whole branches of the horse industry--from harness and carriage makers to wheelwrights and livery stable owners--lost their livelihoods and disappeared. The horse was scorned as antiquated, not deemed to be worth keeping around by any but a relative few. Hands-on horse knowledge disappeared from the American experience, to massive extent. Horses went from being assets to liabilities.
It took a whole reinvention of the horse industry, from utilitarian to recreational, to bring it back from the brink.
I may not need to wonder much longer about what it was like to have age-old conceptions about horses and their perceived value turned over and sunk like one of Magellen's ships, nor to see what might bob back to the surface after the wreck. It's beginning to look more and more like I'll get to find out, first-hand.
posted by Juli Thorson @ 2:00 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Well said.......I've got a few posts with this same subject.
You have illustrated the problem -- no, it's more than a problem it is a large and looming crisis -- with careful brush and pen work until it could not be made more clear. Now. How do we get the people that can do something about it to see the writing on the wall? Those who think they are 'saving' the horse are actually sealing its doom, seems to me. The ironic part is that some of these people might actually be the ones that are dumping unwanted puppies, untrained dogs, and kittens down on the highway near our place. Do they then tell city friends that they 'found a lovely place in the country for Rex?' Is that what they plan to do with Trigger too?
Oh this is really bad! I hope it won't set an example for Europe :-(
Here (Europe), there is a trend that iron is bad for horses, so no shoes and no bits. Because bits can give a threat of pain :-O. When you speak with these people, you realise that they have a very limited experience of horses. They own horses, but keep them as pets. They are beginners riders ...
I am very worried about this "tree-hugging mentality".
This is nonsense. By this definition the horse industry has always operated without a floor., because the moment it becomes more expensive to transport the horse to slaughter than the value of its body at the slaughterhouse, the value of that horse as a slaughter animal is 0.
The calculation is simple: it looks at
- useful meat value of the horse (so horses in good flesh)
- the square feet in the trailer that the horse will take up (so again horses in good flesh, preferably big)
- the likelihood that the horse will handle the trip well (yield factor) so preferably young and healthy.
This means skinny old horses have no value (not enough meat yield), as do small horses (same reason) or very lame horses (may not make the trip) or sick horses (contaminate the other meat).
It is healthy fat horses that can withstand the very long and difficult trip to slaughter and still produce a lot of meat that make for the best profit yield, and having watched the processing lines, most of the stock going through appeared in good flesh even if dehydrated from the trip.
So stop making up scary stories that are not based in solid fact.
I can name quite a few industries that operate without a floor:
1) laptop computers, desktop computers, networking equipment
2) books
3) pets
4) the slave trade (which was very healthy in the US until it was outlawed and continues to flourish elsewhere)
I have euthanized several of my horses due to illness or age, but I would absolutely never allow them to be processed by our current transport system or slaughter method. If you want to bring back slaughter, fix the transport system so that horses are shipped humanely in vehicles where they have comfortable footing and full range of motion of head and neck, and appropriate access to rest, food, and water, and fix the slaughter process so that horses must definitely be rendered fully unconscious, and TESTED as such, before being strung up and bled. The current USDA allowance that 10% of horses can be slaughtered conscious is appalling. We are Americans. The only culture that I know treated living beings the way we treat our slaughter horses were the Nazis, who shipped Jews, Poles, and Political prisoners to the chambers in jam-packed cattle cars with no food and water, threw out the ones that didn't make it, and processed the rest, being sure to harvest the valuable parts like hair, gold teeth, wedding rings and other jewelry.
It is both American, and a tenet of civilized religion, to respect life and have compassion for suffering. I don't personally think that slaughter itself is wrong, but I sure think our slaughter system is very, very broken. It was right to shut it down. It forces our hand to either fix it or find a better way to end the lives of these our servants, the horses.
I TOTALLY agree with muriel!!! i may be young (11) but i love horses and understand this problem!!!
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