AR-News: FW: Article on DeKalb/Horse Slaughter in the U.S.

[jim robertson]

>
>Regarding legislation, see also: http://www.illinoishorse.com/legislation/
>and: http://www.hsus.org/ace/19875
>
>
>Letters to the Editor: letters at suntimes.com
>
>
>HORSES: BELOVED FRIENDS -- OR FOOD?
>Chicago Sun-Times, Tom McNamee, March 21, 2004
>http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-horse21.html
>
>
>"Here's where the animals are brought in," Jim Tucker says. Tucker is 
>talking about horses and pointing to what looks like a garage door. This is 
>the door the horses will walk through to be killed -- horses that somebody 
>sold for a few hundred bucks or less: the old ones, the slow ones, the mean 
>ones, the lame ones, the ugly ones. Chances are, each horse will have a 
>name. Chances are, each one will have pulled a load or carried a rider or 
>eaten sugar from a child's hand. But the moment it goes through this door, 
>its status will plummet to mere livestock, just a cow with spirit. Then, in 
>the next day or two, it will be killed and skinned and gutted, carved into 
>steaks and chops, and shipped to countries across the seas where people eat 
>horse meat. The slaughterhouse is in DeKalb, 60 miles west of Chicago, and 
>Tucker runs the place.
>
>Which puts him in a tough spot. "No doubt about it," he says Friday 
>morning, walking through the place, giving a tour. "It's an issue with some 
>people." How much of an issue? What happens when you tell people what you 
>do for a living? "For every 10 people, I'd say that maybe one or two are 
>amazed," Tucker replies. "They won't talk about it. Most of the rest will 
>say, 'I don't think there's anything wrong with that.' And a couple will 
>say, 'Good for you.'"
>
>Cavel International, a Belgian firm, operated a slaughterhouse for horses 
>in DeKalb from 1987 to 2002. Some people in town protested, but Tucker 
>likes to pull out old business stories from the local papers about how 
>great it was for DeKalb. When the slaughterhouse burned down in 2002, Cavel 
>decided to rebuild. The new plant -- a big block of gray concrete in the 
>boonies of DeKalb -- is scheduled to open in a couple of weeks. It would 
>employ 30 to 40 workers and could handle the slaughter of 100 horses a day.
>
>A bill pending in Springfield, however, would close down the slaughterhouse 
>before the first horses even showed up. The bill, which would ban the 
>slaughter of horses in Illinois for human consumption, was approved by the 
>Senate last year. An amended bill, backed by the state's five biggest 
>racetracks, could be voted on in the House as early as Thursday.
>
>A horse, supporters of the ban argue, is not dumb livestock. It is a 
>beloved friend and central to the American experience. The horse helped 
>build the nation, served the cowboy and carried soldiers into battle. It is 
>a "companion" animal, like a dog or a cat, and a sporting animal. Killing a 
>horse for food, the bill's supporters say, is a fundamental violation of 
>the American way.
>
>Tucker doesn't look like a man trying to undermine the American way. He's 
>an accountant in his late 50s who tucks his fingers into the pockets of his 
>jeans when he walks. He grew up next door in Sycamore, rode horses as a 
>boy, and raised three kids on his paycheck from Cavel. When Tucker first 
>went to work for the company, in 1987, he'd never seen the inside of a 
>slaughterhouse and was fascinated, but not repulsed. "It gets to you a 
>little bit, but it's almost interesting," he says. "You see the animal 
>being slaughtered and skinned and all that. It's what happens in every 
>slaughterhouse." And the fact that the animal was a horse? "I didn't think 
>of it one way or another," he says.
>
>From the loading dock, Tucker walks down one of the two narrow concrete 
>chutes that will lead the condemned horses to a weighing scale, then to 
>four concrete holding pens. Water troughs are built into the walls. Hay 
>bins hang overhead.
>
>Nothing bigger than a spider has died in this building yet, and it's hard 
>to visualize the carnage to come. But critics such as Gail Vacca, who lives 
>in DeKalb and is the Illinois coordinator for the National Horse Protection 
>Coalition, describe a scene of stammering, terrified horses that smell the 
>blood. Horses are not herd animals, Vacca says, and fight out of sheer 
>fear.
>
>From the holding pens, Tucker walks through a door to the "knock box." This 
>is the room in which a worker will reach over and shoot a four-inch 
>retractable bolt straight into the skull of each horse as it enters. 
>Veterinarians call this "stunning" the animal, Tucker says, but that's 
>misleading. "They are dead instantly -- beyond feeling pain," he says. "But 
>then you get into the definition of death. The heart is still beating." 
>Opponents and defenders of slaughtering horses disagree on just about 
>everything, from how safe the meat is -- given the powerful drugs horses 
>are administered -- to how horrific the truck ride is from distant 
>auctions, to whether a horse can sense what's coming. But it is over this 
>issue -- death in the knock box -- that emotions seem to run highest. 
>Tucker says the captive bolt, as it is called, is easily maneuverable and 
>extremely effective. The horse never knows what hit it. But Vacca and 
>others insist that because horses struggle, the captive bolt does not 
>always achieve a clean hit. And then, they say, the horse is hoisted by a 
>chain over a "bleeding trough," still capable of feeling pain, and its neck 
>is slit to drain the blood.
>
>From the knock box room, Tucker moves on to the gutting room, the cutting 
>rooms and the chilling room. Without the cutting machines, yet to be 
>installed, and the hanging carcasses, which may never come, the stainless 
>steel rooms look all the same.
>
>At the shipping dock, Tucker explains how the meat will be flown to Europe, 
>where it will be sold in grocery stores, for a price slightly lower than 
>beef. "People say it's a delicacy in Europe," he says. "It is not. People 
>see it as the same as beef, or a little less."
>
>In the United States, only two slaughterhouses -- both in Texas -- produce 
>horse meat, killing about 50,000 horses a year. Almost all of the meat is 
>shipped to other countries, especially Belgium, France and Italy. In the 
>United States, horse meat can be sold legally only in seven states: 
>Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia.
>
>The United States has about 6.9 million horses, of which about 10 percent a 
>year die of natural causes or are euthanized in the same way as dogs and 
>cats. At rendering plants, the carcasses are used to make leather, pet 
>food, fertilizer and other products.
>
>State Rep. Robert Molaro (D-Chicago), sponsor of the horse slaughter ban, 
>said he feels confident the bill will pass. "What do we tell our kids?" he 
>asked. "How do we say, 'Oh, the horse is so revered. It has helped us in 
>war, helped us on our farms. It's even our pet. And oh, by the way, when 
>it's dead, we're gonna chop it up for people to eat."
>
>But this is what Tucker says he told his three kids when they were growing 
>up: "A slaughterhouse can be upsetting, especially if you've never seen one 
>before. But we've always thought we're doing something commendable. We're 
>employing people. We're bringing in investment. And it's environmentally 
>wasteful to kill a horse and not use the meat."
>
>
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Free up your inbox with MSN Hotmail Extra Storage. Multiple plans available. 
http://click.atdmt.com/AVE/go/onm00200362ave/direct/01/