Eating A Dead Horse
Every year tens of thousands of America’s noble steeds are slaughtered, shipped to Europe, and devoured by communists! There should be a law against such things! Or maybe there shouldn’t …
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THOUGH HORSE SLAUGHTER OPPONENTS will sometimes put forth that the horse has never been a food animal in the United States, the claim is not strictly true. After all, this is America, and there are few things we will not try to sell. Or eat. In 1895, for instance, a group of unidentified street pushers hosted a “free horse meat banquet” in Portland, Oregon, according to a report in the Tacoma Daily News. Four years later, the New York Press reported on a scheme by a man named Bosse to hawk North Dakota horse meat in lower Manhattan. (Coincidence compelled the Press to caution readers against confusing this man with another Bosse, a French scoundrel who’d been arrested outside Long Island City “for selling diseased horseflesh, spirillum sausages and bologna full of bacilli.”) These are only reported instances, of course. One is left to imagine what other campaigns to expand the country’s culinary frontiers may have been waged in territories near and far.
Nor is domestic horse eating confined to the distant past. When beef prices shot up in the early seventies, stores opened in Hawaii, New Jersey, and Connecticut offering cheap horse meat, which housewives from Honolulu to Teaneck deemed palatable enough until the cost rose above that of beef. A decade later, a Connecticut company introduced Chevalean-brand horse meat patties in three New England naval commissaries and also posted vending carts in major cities to serve “Superhorsemeat Steak Sandwiches” (or “Belmont steaks,” as they were nicknamed by New Yorkers). The sandwiches fizzled. The last bastion of unapologetic hippogastronomy in the U.S. may have been the Harvard Faculty Club, where horse meat was a menu fixture from the end of World War II until 1983.
But it’s overseas where one discovers a hearty and long-standing appetite for horseflesh. It is fried in Spain, smoked in Sweden, simmered in Italy in a stew called pastissada, and served raw in France, Belgium, and Japan. The horse burgers at a Slovenian fast-food chain called Hot Horse make a popular late-night snack. (The English-language sections of the Hot Horse Web site are quite charming: “Come to me all the hungry and thirsty and ease your hunger with Horseburgers! Surely no dude’ll be left over hungry.”)
The two Texas plants—Beltex, in Fort Worth, and Dallas Crown, in Kaufman—primarily ship meat to Belgium and to France, where horse consumption has been on the decline of late. With its strong flavor and bright-red hue, horse meat was “the poor man’s steak” in the sixties and seventies, recalls Thierry Burkle, who grew up in Paris and is now the owner and head chef at L’Etoile, a restaurant in San Antonio. Burkle’s mother would often prepare horse meat tartare, mixed with egg and served with an endive salad. By the eighties, though, it was less popular, and many of the boucheries chevalines—“horse butchers”—went bankrupt. “Now it’s more a trend of sophisticated people,” Burkle says, “people that want to eat some exotic animal from Africa and things like that.” Asian horse eaters have picked up the slack. In Kazakhstan 340,000 horses were slaughtered in 2005; in China 1.7 million.
Back in the U.S., the idea of dining on an equine is widely reviled. Consider the case of Don Chance, a Fort Worth—area writer who contributed an article several years ago to Backwoods Home magazine (“Practical ideas for self-reliant living”) in which he defended horse meat as a “legitimate, high-protein food alternative,” provided recipes, and maintained that certain unnamed U.S. restaurants were quietly serving special-order horse meat dishes to foreign tourists—though when I reached Chance by phone, he declined to identify any such establishment. (As a kid, Chance had eaten horse on an Indian reservation, he told me, though he does not eat it today.) Response to the article was swift. Readers clogged the feedback section of the following issue of Backwoods Home with irate letters, one of which suggested that Chance himself be slaughtered and eaten.
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE AUCTION, on a Saturday in September, I accompanied a band of horse lovers on a mission to save a dozen paint horses from an uncertain fate. The rescuers were ardent slaughter opponents. Celebrity fellow travelers notwithstanding, at the heart of the anti-slaughter movement are people like Jerry Finch, the self-described “founder, president, CEO, and main poop scooper” of Habitat for Horses, a Houston-based rescue group. Dedicated to preventing animal cruelty, Habitat deploys some twenty trained volunteer investigators to chase down leads on horses in bad shape and, should they find them, try to persuade owners to take better care of their animals. If all else fails, they remove them to foster homes, working in conjunction with local law enforcement.
Finch had organized the trip, and he’d kindly agreed to pick me up in Fort Worth and let me squeeze into the front seat of his battle-scarred Dodge Ram—the same truck he’d driven around southern Louisiana a year earlier, locating horses after Hurricane Katrina with the help of a dashboard GPS system and plenty of coffee. (“The first place that opened up, believe it or not, was Starbucks,” he said. “Thank God.”) We towed a trailer decorated with stickers reading “Equine Rescue Unit” and “Emergency Response Unit.” If all went well, it would harbor horses later that afternoon.
To my right sat a Habitat investigator, Julie Caramante, a vivacious woman with a thick black ponytail and an oh-gosh brand of enthusiasm that betrayed her Midwestern upbringing. She and Finch had a kind of Burns-and-Allen rapport: Finch, a retiree with a broad, ruddy, well-creased face and pale blue eyes, played the gruff realist to Caramante’s chipper Minnesotan.
“I can’t wait to see these horses!” Caramante would say. “Isn’t this exciting, Jerry?”
Finch would grunt in response, or just keep driving.
Shortly before noon we reached the designated rendezvous point: a restaurant north of Weatherford called the 4C’s Country Corner BBQ and Grill. (Most of the slaughter opponents interviewed for this story were unequivocal carnivores.) We were met there by more volunteers, among them Paula Bacon, the mayor of Kaufman. She ordered a chicken-fried steak, and we settled in to wait for a man named Jimmy Fowler.
Finch had been deliberately vague about who Fowler was, or how they’d found him, or why he was getting rid of his horses. When Caramante told me that Fowler was “a man who takes chickens to Mexico,” Finch corrected her, telling me that Fowler was a man who takes chickens to New Mexico. The only other thing he would tell me about Fowler was that the man didn’t want his horses any longer, which meant that they might one way or another fall into the hands of a killer buyer. Worried that his potential seller might spook, Finch felt that discretion was of the essence. “We need to get the horses locked up and get everything settled,” he said. “And then we can ask questions.”
It had already been a long day. Finch and Caramante had left Houston before dawn, stopped a couple hours later to change a flat on the trailer, and then pressed on to Fort Worth, pausing outside a car dealership and napping in the truck while they waited for me to arrive. Yet the two comrades seemed accustomed to strenuous adventures: There was the Katrina trip, and the time they’d staked out the Kaufman slaughter plant at five-thirty in the morning. Often the individual horses they rescue aren’t bound for slaughter, since many are too skinny to be worth much, but Finch and Caramante view the slaughter process as an extreme form of animal cruelty and so agitate for its abolition as part of their horse rescue work. They make regular trips to Kaufman, where they befriended Bacon. A week before I caught up with them, they’d journeyed to Washington along with Bacon and another Kaufman couple to lobby Congress and to see the House bill passed. (The victory was long in coming but only partial; if the Senate does not take up the bill this month, it will die.) Lining up against them to petition on behalf of the packinghouses was Charles Stenholm. The pro-slaughter camp had not proved to be any great celebrity magnet and had found instead a paid spokesman in the former congressman from Abilene, who’d been the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee before Tom DeLay redrew his district and deposed him.
(Full and somewhat unusual disclosure: As I explained to Finch and Caramante, Stenholm was and is currently in the employ of Olsson, Frank, and Weeda, which is my father’s law firm. In fact, the first I’d heard of the horse slaughter controversy was in August, when I was back in Washington, D.C., for a visit and my father, standing over the breakfast table in his robe and slippers, uttered those dreaded words: “Hey, you know what you ought to do a story on?”)
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