Horse 'Kill Buying' Legal: Critics Highlight Abuse and Deception

January 19, 2015

AWHC Contributor

GREENWOOD, S.C. — Joe Mann’s cellphone rang, and this time it was an animal control officer asking for help rescuing horses from a neglect case in Laurens County, S.C. In the eight years Mann has run Big Oaks Rescue Farm in Greenwood, he’s been asked to take animals from all types of hellish conditions. So from the officer’s tone, Mann expected it to be bad – but nothing like this.

He arrived at the Waterloo property Dec. 15 and found three emaciated horses and one donkey with their ribs and hips protruding out like sticks, their bellies distended from starvation. When they loaded the animals onto a trailer to haul to Mann’s sanctuary, the donkey was too weak to stand and had to be gently drug up the ramp on its side, Mann said.

The worst part, though, was in the back of the property along the wood line. There in a shallow ravine were about 25 horse carcasses, some decomposed to skeletons and some wide-eyed with their halters still buckled around their heads.

“Disgusting is not strong enough. Despicable is not strong enough,” Mann said. “Let’s just say it was one of the worst sights I’d ever seen in my life.”

Justin White, 24, was arrested Jan. 3 and charged with five counts of felony ill treatment of animals and torture, but police discovered the starving animals were allegedly remnants of a legal but widely debated business known as “kill buying.”

Kill buyers purchase horses at auctions or other outlets in the U.S., haul them hundreds of miles and sell them by the trailer-load to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. These buyers used to sell the animals to plants in the U.S. as well, but after legislation pushed the last three domestic equine slaughterhouses to close in 2007, all meat horses are now sent across the borders.

In 2006, 24 percent of the 138,000 American horses slaughtered for meat were processed in Mexico or Canada and 76 percent in the U.S., compared to 100 percent of the 145,000 horses slaughtered across the borders in 2013, according to government figures.

Slaughter supporters say that when the U.S. lost its equine processing plants, Americans lost a way to humanely address the country’s overpopulation of unwanted and neglected horses under government oversight and prevent abuses at many unregulated Mexican slaughterhouses.

“My biggest concern is that horses going to totally unregulated slaughter facilities in Mexico is much worse than even a poorly run U.S. plant,” Temple Grandin, a livestock industry consultant on animal behavior who has helped design slaughterhouses to reduce stress in animals, wrote in 2012. “It is my opinion that the worst outcome, from an animal welfare perspective, is a horse going to a local Mexican abattoir. Once a horse crosses the Mexican border, there is no way to monitor how it is transported or slaughtered.”

Mann said whether the horse is slaughtered in the U.S. or abroad, the Laurens County case is evidence of the inherent abuses embedded in the trade, beginning with the neglect from the kill buyers and ending with the painful and terrifying killing process.

“In my opinion, the horse is the most betrayed animal on Earth,” Mann said. “The horse carried us when we didn’t have motor vehicles. The horse carried us through battle. Now look at how the horse is betrayed in the way we treat them.”

The Waterloo property owner told the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office that White, her daughter’s boyfriend, routinely bought horses at auctions and would keep them at her property until he sold them for slaughter, according to an incident report. She said the horses that were not able to be sold for meat or those that died in the process would be dumped in the ravine.

When Deputy Steve Paterson inspected the property Dec. 15, the property owner showed him a horse that had starved to death because it was injured and could not reach food or water.

“She stated that on two occasions Mr. White had led stallions to the back of the property and shot them in the head so that they would fall into the ravine because of the fact that they were (uncastrated) they could not be sold,” according to the report.

When reached by phone Monday, a man who identified himself as White denied being a kill buyer but hung up when asked further about his animals.

A Question of Regulation

Horses were slaughtered for meat in the U.S. for decades, but the modern incarnation of full-scale processing plants began in the 1970s, according to Chris Heyde, the deputy director of government and legal affairs for the Animal Welfare Institute. The American palate never had much taste for horse meat, and today most U.S. horse meat is shipped to Europe and Asia or remains in Mexico after processing.

The number of U.S. plants dwindled from more than a dozen at their height to just two in Texas and one in Illinois in 2007 after states banned the practice. In 2006, and each year since, Congress withheld funding in the annual appropriations bill that would pay for the mandatory U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections required for slaughterhouses to function, effectively shuttering the industry.

To stop the slaughter of American horses for good, advocates are working to pass the Safeguard American Food Exports Act, which has failed every year since being introduced in 2013. The bill would ban the sale or transport of horses across state or foreign lines for human consumption on the premise that domestic horses are regularly treated with painkillers, dewormers and other drugs that make them unsafe to eat.

The European Union on Thursday suspended horse meat imports from Mexico after audits found serious problems with Mexico’s ability to trace medical histories of the horses slaughtered for meat. The auditors also cited the inhumane treatment of American horses hauled to Mexico, which can include dozens of hours of driving without food, water or rest and brutal injuries upon arrival.

Slaughter advocates argue that resurrecting domestic slaughterhouses and increasing their numbers would reduce the distance horses would have to travel and better regulate their deaths. However, Heyde said the portion of U.S. horses actually being sent to slaughter, barely 2 percent of the country’s 9.2 million equines, is not large enough to meet a demand for a slaughterhouse in every state, or even region.

Holly Gann, a horse slaughter campaign manager for the Humane Society of the United States, said more than 92 percent of the horses sent to slaughter are in good condition and could have productive lives. Because of their expensive upkeep, Gann said family pets or low-level show horses are sometimes sold at local auctions by owners who can’t afford to keep them but are unaware their horses are being bought for slaughter.

“Kill buyers are involved in a very dark, deceptive practice,” Gann said. “They go from auction to auction, they often deceive people about what their intentions are. And the abuse is not just the transport and the slaughter process itself, but we’re seeing these cases of kill buyers starving and neglecting these horses while they wait.”

Heyde said there is no humane way to slaughter horses, which are skittish, flighty and herd-bound by nature. In the only two EU-regulated facilities in Mexico and in the former U.S. plants, the captive bolt method is used. Workers corner the animal in a box and shoot a metal bolt into its head, which renders it brain-dead but not dead. The horse is then pulled up onto a conveyer by its leg, and a worker slits its throat to kill the animal by bleeding it out.

In many unregulated facilities, undercover videos have shown Mexican workers using the puntilla knife method, where the animal is stabbed in the back until it collapses.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released graphic photos taken of injured and bloody horses as they arrived at the Beltex Corp. plant in Fort Worth, Texas, which was a USDA-inspected facility. Some horses were shown walking on broken legs with missing eyeballs, flesh wounds and other serious injuries, proving to Heyde that abuse cannot be prevented even with government oversight.

“Neither one is right,” he said of domestic versus foreign slaughter. “It’s not one of those things where it’s better to get beaten in the front of the head than the back of the head. They’re both wrong. The abuse is here as much as it is sending them to Mexico or Canada … we absolutely have to pass the (transport) ban and stop slaughter.”

‘We Never Get Used to It’

At Big Oak Rescue in Greenwood, where about 350 animals roam almost 50 acres, the three horses and donkey confiscated from White are in a recovery program, but they are not the only ones. The day after Mann was called to Laurens County, the McCormick County Sheriff’s Office requested his help in another abuse case involving a suspect who deputies have reports of being involved in kill buying, according to Chief Deputy C.E. Gable.

The sheriff’s office received a complaint Dec. 14 from someone who saw Trent Alan Neal, 22, pulling a dead horse behind a pickup. At the time, the McCormick Police Department was also investigating Neal for a video posted on social media that showed him beating his girlfriend’s dog to death by picking it up by the collar and dropping it on the concrete, then taking the dog by the throat “while sitting on its back and pulling its jaw backward,” according to an incident report.

Officers from both departments arrived at his property Dec. 15 and arrested Neal on one count of animal cruelty for the dog case. While there, they noticed several horses with their ribs showing and two dead donkeys, according to a sheriff’s office report. They obtained a search warrant and the next day found a dead goat, two dead donkeys, a dead colt and two horses dead and decaying.

Mann rescued from Neal’s property 19 emaciated horses, a mule and a donkey that could not stand because of dehydration and starvation. Neal was arrested again Dec. 19 by the sheriff’s office and charged with five counts of ill treatment of animals and torture, which adds to a pending case from March in which he was charged with five counts of the same crime, according to South Carolina court records.

After three days of treatment at Big Oak, the donkey still could not get up. Veterinarian Sabrina Jacobs, of Performance Equine Vets in Aiken, euthanized the animal Dec. 19. While Jacobs worked, Mann, unable to watch, unloaded bales of hay off a trailer that had been delivered by a donor.

“This is not unusual at all, but we never get used to it,” he said.

Mann, 66, spent most of his life as a welder and founded Big Oak in 2007 when he retired. He grew up with a passion for animals and always found ways to help ones in need. Mann said although animals have come to him from abuse and starvation cases before, the animals from the kill buyers took a harsher toll on him. He has a hard time understanding the abuse but is not afraid to face it.