Dear John,
One day they're galloping in a pasture. Or carrying a human companion on a shade-covered trail in a painted forest. Or racing on a track in front of thousands, with fans admiring their grace and their flexing of muscle as they eat up ground and gallop at 45 miles an hour.
On a different day, however, they may be sold at auction, with “kill buyers” laying in wait. They purchase the horses without disclosing the animals are to be killed.
Hustled up the ramp of a trailer and jammed in with other frightened horses. Sent to a hold facility with dirty water, no food, their injuries unattended. And transported again in another overcrowded truck with urine and feces-soaked floors, often on a journey of more than 20 hours, with no break or food or water. And then, with eyes as big as saucers, forced into a kill box with an electric prod. There, men put a captive bolt gun to their heads and then slit their throat. They are then taken apart piece by piece.
Such are the contrasting fates of American horses in a world with a predatory horse slaughter industry.
Partnering with our friends at Animals’ Angels, we’ve just completed a nationwide investigation into the horse slaughter industry. We’ll be broadcasting the results to the nation next week. But we wanted to tell you first what’s going on.
We uncovered that these animals — most of whom provided years of faithful service and companionship or run free on public lands in the American West — are routinely subjected to a level of mistreatment inconsistent with the dictates of our anti-cruelty laws and at odds with the norms of our long-standing appreciation of these animals.
The industry’s actions are driven not by any honest interest in handling a phony “surplus” of American equines, but by foreign demand entirely disconnected from any knowledge of the conditions of horses in America.
Illegal acts, fraud, and misrepresentations are rampant throughout the horse slaughter industry. At every auction, transactions take place where many horses are traded illegally from trailer to trailer in the parking lot, especially by substandard horseracing tracks, to evade detection of their involvement in the slaughter industry. Racehorse owners apparently do not want discarded animals to be discovered by auction visitors not tied to the slaughter industry.
This report will make plain what we’ve known all along: We must ban the slaughter of U.S.-born horses shipped live to Canada or Mexico.
The good news is, the foreign shipments are in steep decline. Still, though, around 20,000 American horses are cut up in slaughter plants not far over our American borders and then shrink-wrapped and sent to Japan, Russia, and China for high-end consumers. American horses deserve better than that.
These poor creatures — whose forebears literally helped Americans settle the country — have done nothing wrong. They are just the unwitting victims of an industry that sees horses as nothing more than meat on the hoof.
This year, we are going to do all we can to pass national legislation to shut down these live-horse exports for slaughter. We’ll face the full-on efforts of the cattle industry and the kill buyers who’ll fight us.
That’s why we hope you’ll donate today and join us in this fight and finally bury the horse slaughter industry.
Last year, Animal Wellness worked to maintain the Congressional ban slaughter in the U.S. If it’s wrong to slaughter American horses in the U.S., it’s wrong also to outsource that slaughter to Canada or Mexico.
Let’s do this together.
For the horses,
Wayne Pacelle
President
