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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At last Fowler appeared, sun-browned and a little jowly, with tufting hair under a tan ball cap and more front teeth absent than present. He seemed to enjoy talking, especially to Caramante, who has the sort of Ivory-girl good looks that are somehow unassuming and striking at the same time. They sat across a table from one another, gabbing away. The man hardly seemed skittish, as Finch had feared, so I joined them and tried to listen in. But immediately Finch sat down across from me and gave me such a startling stare that I stood back up, chastened, and moved off toward the door.
The rescue group, hauling four trailers in all, eventually followed Fowler back to his homestead, which was littered with the paraphernalia of various agricultural and mechanical endeavors: hog traps, a go-kart, the spray-painted shell of an old car. In a small pen, several black mares, a sunburned cremello filly, and three dappled yearlings waited, some of the older ones with auction tags still hanging around their necks. If you don’t spend much time around horses, it’s easy to forget how they can be at once so powerful and so obliging; their contained force was palpable as they circled, while Fowler and a couple of the volunteers tried to shepherd them toward the trailers. Fowler shouted and slapped at them, and the giant creatures scrambled through a chute and up a ramp—to freedom! Though it’s perhaps hard to recognize freedom when it takes the form of a small metal box on wheels.
After we drove away, headed for a camp outside Austin where the horses would be temporarily sheltered, Finch vented his disgust at “backyard breeders” like Fowler: “They breed and breed, and for what purpose? That guy said he was against slaughter, but he’s seen what happens. These backyard breeders are all over the place.” The resulting proliferation leaves Finch trying to sweep sand off a beach. The first two horses he bought, in 1998, were purchased outside an auction near Galveston from a killer buyer who’d picked up more animals than would fit in his trailer. He named them Pete and Smokey. Realizing that the pair had almost been turned into steaks, Finch started to examine the slaughter issue, and the more he found out, the more appalled he became.
“I am not a vegetarian,” he said. “I am not an animal rights activist—to me they’re people that have gone over the edge and think that the pigs should be free and chickens should be pecking at buttercreams. Animal rights and animal welfare are totally different things. We’re against cruelty. This business is cruel at every level.”
This was a point that had confused me when I’d first read about the horse slaughter debate. I didn’t see any hard-and-fast distinction between slaughtering a horse for its meat and slaughtering a cow, other than the fact that people are fonder of horses than they are of cows. Opponents of horse slaughter object to a horse meat plant in the same way that they would object to a dog abattoir. (According to a poll commissioned by the anti-slaughter camp, 68 percent of Americans think the plants should be shut down.) But on what grounds did they object? How, as meat eaters, did they conclude that horses were off the table?
The problem, Finch and other anti-slaughter activists maintain, is not the killing, or even the eating, of horses. It’s fine for a vet to come out and euthanize a horse by injection; it’s okay, if necessary, to shoot a horse, and if some horse owner chooses to barbecue the animal afterward, so be it. Commercial horse slaughter, however, is cruel in a way that other butchery is not. First of all, because of the scarcity of horse plants, horses are shipped much longer distances than other animals, sometimes in double-deck cattle trailers that are too low-roofed for tall horses (though as of this month it’s illegal to use double-deck trailers for horse transport). Moreover, unlike cows, horses have an extremely strong flight instinct and will sometimes resist confinement. As a result, the method by which the horse is put to death—a worker administers a projectile to the brain with a device called a captive bolt gun—does not always succeed the first time. This method has been approved as humane by the American Veterinary Medical Association, which in fact opposed the anti-slaughter bill in Congress, but for some that’s just a reason to be suspicious of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
I asked Finch why, if his real objection was to cruel conditions, didn’t they just devise a way to make the process less cruel?
“That’s like saying, ‘If you could invent a way for automobile driving that was totally safe, would it be all right for a two-year-old to drive?’” he answered. “Besides, horses are not raised for food in this country. It’s against our culture and against our beliefs. Our battles were not fought on the backs of pigs.”
Caramante piped up. “Sam Houston didn’t ride on the back of a pig, did he, Jerry?”
We were all agreed on that point. But in the swerve of the discussion from animal cruelty to Sam Houston’s method of transport, from ethics to some sort of cultural preference, the argument fell apart, it seemed to me, or stopped being an argument. In order to declare something illegal, surely we need a more substantive basis than an appeal to history, and merely imposing the distaste of the majority by statute would be as un-American as, well, eating a dead horse. The reasonable case against horse slaughter must in the end depend on whether or not it constitutes cruelty. Yet this question is hard to answer. Those in favor of keeping the plants open attest that slaughter is perfectly humane and warn that greater numbers of unwanted horses would suffer ill treatment if it were banned.
To properly weigh the allegations against one another, I would have to get closer to the source.
THE TOWN OF KAUFMAN LIES at the convergence of two highways, U.S. 175 and Texas Highway 243, and from there you can see the Dallas Crown plant on its low bluff, a small hodgepodge of cinder block, sheet metal, and brick. For Paula Bacon, now in her second term as mayor, it’s the wrong sort of signpost. I’d first met Bacon with the rescuers—at a rest stop I’d watched her perch on the edge of one of the trailers and croon, “Hi, baby. Hi, baby,” to the horses—and I saw her again a week later for lunch at a strip mall restaurant called Wong’s Garden Buffet. She brought along her 83-year-old father, Grandon, as she had on the horse rescue trip. Both had come to Wong’s directly from work: Bacon teaches high school English in the mornings, while her dad still goes in to P.G. Bacon Lumber Company, the hardware store his grandfather opened in 1896. The store, located right off the square in a light-blue clapboard building with a faded Pittsburgh Paints sign hung in a dusty window, looks as if it went out of business long ago.
Bacon keeps an old fortune-cookie fortune taped inside her wallet that reads “Tomorrow will be an extraordinary day for you,” and there’s something both open and willful about her manner that suggests that she continues to believe it, in spite of any past experiences to the contrary. For years she lived in “glorious Austin,” but she returned to Kaufman in 2000 to be closer to her father, after the store was held up twice. She agreed to serve on the Planning and Zoning Commission, and then, when she grew dissatisfied with the way the city was being administered—“There is a good-old-boy network here, and man, is it strong,” she says—she ran for mayor.
One day, about a year before the mayoral race, she found herself riding in a van with several teachers who worked in Kaufman but lived outside town. “They started saying, ‘What kind of place is this? They have a slaughter plant of horses of all things?’ I found myself defending it, but wondering.” With the help of her best friend, Mary Nash, who owned property near the plant, she began to investigate further. She learned that in 2002 the Texas attorney general’s office had upheld a section of the state agriculture code outlawing the slaughter of horses for food (a court ruling is pending). She learned that the Dallas Crown plant had been releasing more pollutants into the city’s sewer system than its industrial permit allowed. She learned that the company, which is owned by a Belgian corporation, had paid just $5 in federal income tax in 2004. And she began to feel that she—and the city of Kaufman—had been played for fools.
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