Horses Slaughtered Daily

The nearly 1,800 wild horses sold for slaughter get all the attention, but domesticated horses are killed every day

A guy buys nearly 1,800 wild horses for virtually nothing from the US Bureau of Land Management, makes a profit by selling them to a Mexican slaughterhouse and then gets busted.

But he doesn't suffer the criminal consequences for conspiring to kill the federally protected species, which are branded on the neck by the BLM so that is there no doubt.

That was the case in late October, after a US Bureau of Land Management federal investigation concluded that Colorado rancher Tom Davis made tens of thousands of dollars from the sales of wild horses, and that the Los Lunas-based Southwest Livestock Auction, one of the largest kill-buyers in the country, may have played a role in it.

While there was no direct proof that the horses that Davis sold to Southwest were BLM horses, there was a significant amount of circumstantial evidence in the investigation, which outlined a process that was void of any sort of physical inspection but relied instead on the word and the paperwork of the buyer, Dennis Chavez.

Chavez, whose practice has come under fire in the past, did not return several phone message from SFR seeking comment, and in the wake of the investigation, animal rights activists across the country say they are stunned by the lack of accountability and the failure to prosecute.

Santa Fe's Susan Carter, whose daily job is juggling various websites and posting the latest news on horse slaughter, is among them.

"It's sad," Carter says. "The wild horses are killed, and nobody does anything about it. What's even sadder is that domesticated horses are killed every day, and you rarely hear about it. It's this big, unregulated industry that's not even on the radar, except for us.

"It's big global market stuff."

Although the investigation into Davis dealt only with wild horses, Carter points out that it revealed all sorts of flaws in the kill-buy business at Southwest Livestock Co., which claims to be operating aboveboard. But the company has had several documented charges of animal cruelty, in both its feedlot and while transporting animals to Santa Teresa near the Mexican border.

As many as 150,000 domesticated horses in the United States are shipped to slaughter in Mexico and Canada each year, Carter says, but because the sales are legal, they don't get the attention they deserve, although the transportation is riddled with problems, with horses crammed into trucks with no water for the six-hour ride.

Meanwhile, everybody is passing the buck in the Davis case whose admitted illegal sales occurred over a span of two years, between 2012 and 2014. The attorneys general of New Mexico and Colorado have declined to prosecute, and the BLM has since referred the matter to the US Department of Agriculture, saying it falls within the realm of a food inspection issue.

Representatives of the USDA's Office of the Inspector General declined to comment on whether it was investigating Davis or not, saying it's a matter of policy not to talk about ongoing cases or whether they even exist.

The federal government has not conducted food inspections for horses since 2006, because the animals aren't recognized for human consumption in the country.

Yet the sale and transportation of horses to Mexico for slaughter is legal. Carter says the volume is so massive that 87 percent of the horsemeat that's packaged in Mexico comes from the United States; it's exported to faraway countries like China and Russia, where horsemeat is considered a delicacy, along the line of veal in the US.

One issue she raises is that horsemeat is tainted with all sorts of toxins and steroids that are potentially lethal, a fact that has caused the European Union, as of this past January, to end the practice of buying from Mexico, in the name of protecting the horse meat-eating public.

In addition to that problem, some of the horses are so old and so crippled that they should be humanely euthanized on the spot, not made to suffer by taking the six-hour truck ride south to Santa Teresa, notes Carter.

These days, all eyes are on US Sen. Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, who's been working to pass laws against the border-crossing transportation.

"Horses are a symbol of the West, and they are an important part of our nation's history and our way of life today," Senator Udall said in a prepared statement last week. "Not only is the idea of horse slaughter for human consumption abhorrent among most Americans, but USDA is already stretched too thin and doesn't have the resources to properly oversee the industry. The practice is unnecessarily cruel and has a record of gruesome pollution and terrible conditions. New Mexicans write to me regularly to say that horse slaughter has no place in the United States. I agree and I'll keep working to ensure taxpayer dollars can't be used to allow this practice to exist."

To address this issue, he is co-sponsoring a bill with Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Susan Collins (R-ME). The Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act is designed to end the current practice of exporting American horses for slaughter abroad and protect the public from consuming toxic horse meat, according to his press office.


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