Resenting Compassion
On Wednesday, June 11, 2008, a representative of a Colorado horse rescue was thrown off an area livestock auction premises with much ado and told, in front of several witnesses, never to come back.
What was he doing that was so offensive to the livestock auction owner? Was he taking pictures of skinny and injured horses? Was he posting anti-horse slaughter flyers? Was he soliciting donations? Was he running around the place offering to buy horses out from under the auctioneer? Was he stopping trucks on the way in and warning people that their horse might be sold for slaughter? What was it that he was doing?
Well, none of the above.
He was meeting a Colorado State Brand Inspector in the Colorado State Brand Inspector’s capacity as a Colorado State Brand Inspector employed by the State of Colorado in a location that was convenient for the Colorado State Brand Inspector to perform his Colorado State Brand Inspector function, which, on Wednesday, June 11, 2008, happened to be the parking lot of the auction. He was also caught, at the same time, trying to help extricate somebody’s stallion from a dangerous entanglement with a fence.
It is still unclear which of these transgressions triggered the expulsion and the accompanying stream of invective which concluded: “You ruined my horse business!’
The horse rescue representative was meeting the brand inspector because, when horses change ownership in Colorado, it’s the law that they get a brand inspection. This day’s circumstance involved a homestead which had burned to the ground, and the grieving, dispossessed homeowner needed a place for two well-loved, half-Arabians who had nowhere to go at the time but the rescue. The auctioneer responded to this revelation with the emphatic statement that he did not care that her house burned down, which included an expletive that was rather surprising to the curious onlookers.
The anger and frustration that pushed the auctioneer to this vulgar outburst are undeniably real, or he wouldn’t have exploded like that. The question that wants answering is this: Who ‘ruined’ the auction’s horse business? It is understandable that, being a horse rescue and, by association, part of the Great Animal Rights Machine, one would be tempted to blame this rescue and/or other area rescuers for the closure of the U.S. slaughter plants. However, the laws that closed the Texas and Illinois plants were state laws. There is no federal law prohibiting the sale and transport of horses for slaughter. Nobody in Colorado closed the slaughter plants in Texas or Illinois, and to place blame for this on a local horse rescue is irrational. [Note: This horse rescue is not a political activism group, anyway. If anyone wishes to find political activism groups to join or to blame, just Google the words, 'horse slaughter.']
Now, I admit I hate horse slaughter. But the closure of the U.S. horse slaughter plants has probably done more harm than good. It’s Adversely Affected the Economy. It’s caused a Great Wasting of Fuel. It’s eliminated wages in this country and given them to people in other countries. It’s been one of the final nails in the coffin of at least one Utah livestock auction. It hasn’t stopped slaughter, but it’s increased costs and complicated logistics for the people who transport the horses (I know, the smallest violin in the world is playing a sad song…) But most of all, shutting down U.S. slaughter plants without an existing federal ban on the sale and transport of horses for slaughter has increased the suffering of the horses that are going to slaughter anyway!
Now, I admit that I have never been an activist in favor of H.R. 503 and S. 311, a.k.a. the slaughter ban. Horses Are Livestock, after all (can you see that I’m trying, here, to see all sides?). If NAIS isn’t bad enough, the slaughter ban would be yet another way the government can intrude on a rancher’s right to decide what to do with his property. If we give the government permission to control who we sell our livestock to, I believe it follows that soon we could be handing over the rest of our private property. If horse slaughter is to end, I believe it should die a natural death as the result of people in the position to be affected by it having found better alternatives and making decent, educated choices, not as the result of laws made by people hundreds of miles away from the issue with nothing to go on but emotions.
Yet, as owners of livestock, just as with keepers of companion animals, are we not blessed with being stewards of God’s creatures? Or, if you prefer, stewards of Mother Earth, of whom animals and people are part? Our laws will be the measure of our values as a civilization, when we are history. Shouldn’t our laws reflect our sense of stewardship? Shouldn’t our laws require that we care for the animals we eat? Shouldn’t our laws protect the chickens and the cows and the veal calves and the pigs and buffalo and deer and rabbits and grouse and require a humane and respectful life and death for all? And then, if we have such laws, and they also extend over horses, why should slaughtering horses for food be any less moral than slaughtering anything else that is beautiful and alive? As in the aboriginal cultures, we must honor and revere the live we take to sustain ourselves. We must honor the wheat and corn and coconuts, the chickens, eggs, cows, the whatever. If we were to do this, then taking the life of the horse for food for whatever reason would not have the heinous stigma that it has for us today.
Wouldn’t it be better to have regulated, humanely-run, USDA-monitored (and also humane organization oversight of) horse slaughter facilities providing jobs for people and horse meat for export, zoos, and wildlife rehabs all around the U.S. than to have stigmatized, vilified, contentious and economically struggling individuals trucking horses hundreds of miles to foreign countries with no regulation of how the animals are treated and no wqay to know what drugs and toxic substances are in the horses’ bodies? (Horse medication labels read, ‘Not for use in horses intended for human consumption.’ Well, how many horses are intended for human consumption? None are, until the moment they’re sold to the dealer who makes that decision without knowledge of the animal’s history.)
But UNTIL slaughter of horses is humane in practice as it is in theory and in the halls of Congress (where they put the words ‘humane’ and ’slaughter’ next to one another as if it’s not an oxymoron), UNTIL horses can be sold by people in intention that the horse contribute to the circle of life and in the knowledge that this use will not entail terror, suffering and abuse, UNTIL the auction house owners and ‘kill-buyers’ exhibit compassion and caring towards the feelings of sellers and about the quality of the horses’ end of life, UNTIL they are dedicated to the humane treatment of the horses they traffic in, UNTIL it is no longer possible for a two-month-old foal to be abandoned without food, water, or future in the back lot of an auction yard while its dam is hauled away to her death, UNTIL industry officials may no longer joke about horses ‘needing their heads cut off’ in front of teary, shocked lay people, maybe, until then, horse slaughter should be banned.
Are these auction people just jerks, or are they a body of nice folks just trying to make a living, who have been squeezed into their circle of wagons by a hooting tribe of ignorant animal-rights extremists, and their need for mutual support and solidarity has resulted in some occasional crass and defensive behavior toward members of the local public who have nothing whatever to do with their misfortunes and had nothing against them until they became abusive?
As with any extreme either/or question, the answer probably lies in both directions. Not all the industry people at this auction are rude. Some have been quite nice. But the atmosphere is charged. The anger is palpable. It’s too bad people can’t just settle down and try to understand and help each other, since in the end, we’re all as mortal as the horses. But we can choose to die alone in bitterness, or as part of a community, knowing we did the best we could.
July 1, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Being a part of the “great animal rights” is whats doing it. The AR movement was started in the 1970’s by a man named Singer. Sihger was a atheist who believed in Darwin’s evolution writings. This included the belief that humans are equal to all animals. The AR movement is currently supporting human with animal sex. indeed animal rights is a dirty word.
July 1, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Wow. Ya know, I don’t know any animal welfare activists that belong to that particular group. Last I checked, human with animal … you know … was considered cruelty to animals!
Horsebackwriter
July 1, 2008 at 9:16 pm
A wonderfully thoughtful post Amanda! It is possible a completely unrelated telephone or in-person conversation set the offending auctioneer off. There are people in the horse production & auction business who have compassion for horses, and, while conducting successful businesses, think about the future in a constructive way, without resentment. Bill Addis of Addis Equine Auction who specializes in Arabians is one such rarity.
You are quite right that laws will not solve the problem. By law, millions of acres of federal lands (not to mention state preserves) are set aside by the voters as refuges for an American icon as important as the bald eagle – our wild horses and burros in their original homeland – North America. The taxpayer funds a host of BLM rangers to ensure they get moved from overpopulated ranges to empty or underpopulated ones when grazing or water is insufficient. Instead, however, 30,000 so-called
“unadoptable” wild horses rounded up by the BLM from overpopulated ranges sit in “holding pens” year after year, and the BLM with the help of the cattlemen and their paid lobbyists want Congress to give them permission to send those horses to Canada or Mexico to slaughter, so they can take another 30,000 off the ranges and continue the cycle. Why? Because the preserves we voters created for them and pay for with our taxes but were not yet occupied got leased for pennies per year to cattlemen to graze their herds, and they do not want to have to spend more to graze on their own land and provide water – they want the leases to continue in perpetuity – especially now that the tax subsidized biofuel craze has sent the cost of all feed skyrocketing to unpredented windfall profits for agri-business. So whatcha think? Does our Wild Horse Preservation Act protect our wild horses as we intended? Humane slaughter and public safety food inspection laws don’t stop downer cattle, pigs and sheep from being dragged to uninspected slaughter, because 25% of the USDA Inspector Veterinarian jobs are vacant year after year, and businesses won’t sit idle for days waiting for one to show up. Note the scandal earlier this year at the California beef plant that processed millions of pounds uninspected causing a recall, and was filmed dragging not sick, but transport stressed cows into the chute, or into piles where they lay atop one another to eventually expire. Who says these illegal Latino workers are better trained, or better supervised, than their counterparts south of the border, and that the loss of the 250 jobs at those 3 horse slaugther plants for illegals represented an economic hardship to Illinois or Texas? Not one filed for unemployment benefits in those states, and the plant managers are still employed by their foreign firms – packaging venison, buffalo, javelina, elk, and moose meat for a company called “Exotic Game” with the same business address. Oh, and they attend a meat exporting conference annually put on by the US Export arm of the USDA at upscale resorts like Pebble Beach for one week – all expenses paid by the tacpayer for both the government employees and the agri-business representatives, to strategize on how to market American meats competitively in foreign lands. They have no interest in feeding hungry people in poor nations – they are marketing upscale products to high-end customers. This is not the Peace Corps or Feed the Hungry NGOs making sure the body of a dead horse does not go to waste and completes the cycle of life. This is not even good business as taught to MBA candidates – it is “get your nose in the government trough” economics taught at the state agricultural colleges ever since the New Deal and resulting in a $262 BILLION Annual Farm Bill. That’s more than we spend on Defense during Wartime, or on Education, to subsidize giant profitable corporations, and throwback unprofitable smalltimers like the auctioneer who yelled obscenities in public at a potential customer. No, making laws won’t help the horses. But pulling the plug on the money hose and blogs like yours will. God bless you and keep blogging.
July 1, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Definitely, more food for thought. Thank you for your information and insight.
Horsebackwriter