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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(According to Mark Calabria, an attorney for Dallas Crown who lives in Kaufman and wryly refers to Bacon as “our beloved mayor,” water treatment facility records show that the slaughter plant hasn’t imposed any excess burden on the sewer system. He adds that in some years the expense of litigation with the city may have reduced the company’s bottom line—and hence its federal tax bill—but that the company pays considerable payroll and property taxes while providing some fifty jobs to the community.)
After lunch, Bacon drove me around town and out by the plant to have a look. Until recently the outdoor horse pens were visible from the highway, and activists would come with their video cameras to film the operation. But this year the plant erected a white metal fence around the property, posted with No Trespassing signs.
I still hoped to see something of the place, though, and so the next morning, bright and early, I drove back to the slaughterhouse. From the parking lot it was possible to glimpse horses in the pens below, awaiting the bolt gun. Airline shipping containers were stacked on one side of the lot. A couple of men in long gray smocks passed by. A sign on the office door warned that employees reporting to work without their smocks would be sent home without pay.
Inside, a large man chatted with a young woman sitting behind a desk. I introduced myself and asked the woman whether it would be possible to tour the facility, though I already felt confident of the answer.
The woman shook her head slowly. “Sorry,” she said.
I walked out, and the large man followed me. I tried to get a better look at the horses in the pens, but when I turned back, the large man was watching. “Ma’am,” he said sternly, pointing toward the exit.
Outside the fence, a truck had pulled up to make a delivery. The walls of the trailer behind the cab had two rows of vents at the top, through which I could make out, first, a brown ear and then, there in the dimness, a big dark eye.
FOR DETAILS OF WHAT IT WAS LIKE inside the plant, I needed an eyewitness. I tracked down a young guy who’d worked at Dallas Crown for almost a year, stacking zoo meat, pushing carcasses, and trimming cuts. (He’d been fired for absenteeism and now worked elsewhere. He didn’t want his name used. I’ll call him Mike.)
“It was a good place to work,” Mike said. He didn’t believe that the animals were abused or that the captive bolt missed its target very often.
“If they miss, the doctor—boy, he’d be pissed off,” he said, referring to the plant’s USDA inspector. “One time they didn’t knock right, they had that horse kicking and kicking the walls, hanging from his hind legs, and you could see his whole body shaking. You ever see somebody shoot a lizard with buckshot?” I told him I hadn’t. “Anyway, the doc got real mad.”
He slipped my business card between his cigarette pack and its plastic sleeve and opened his first beer of the afternoon. I told him I wanted to know more about how they butchered the horses.
“You really want to know?” he asked. I did. He started to enumerate the steps of the process: Knock ’em and it falls, he said. Chain it up by its legs. Cut the main vein. Skin the neck part and leave the skin hanging. Somebody else skins the head.
Maybe I didn’t really want to know. By the time he got to “take the male part or female part off,” I’d stopped trying to picture what he was describing.
The one thing that bothered him, Mike said, was that, to his mind, some of the other employees were too lax about cleaning their knives. A second-generation Mexican American, he’d also sparred with some of the immigrants on the line. He said he didn’t like immigrants.
We were sitting outside his mother’s house, in the shade of an elm tree, a child’s plastic rocking horse in front of us. Presently a neighbor wandered over, another young man who’d worked at the plant for two weeks and then quit.
“I don’t see why they should close the plants,” Mike was saying. “There’s horses with broken legs, horses that are sick. We eat cows, we eat beef. What are we going to do with our horses? Just let the meat go to waste?”
“Because,” the neighbor said. “It’s cruelty to animals.”
“What are we going to do with all the sick horses?” Mike asked. “Where do you think they’re going to go?”
“No matter if they’re sick,” the neighbor said. “If someone’s going to get eight years in the penitentiary for burning and stabbing a cat—it’s torture.”
“It’s not torture. People eat this meat.”
“This is our culture. We don’t kill horses. They’re pets.”
“Some people have cows as a pet,” Mike said.
“I just don’t think it’s right, not in Texas. That’s somebody’s pet.”
“Why did they sell them then?” Mike asked. “They’re not doing it out of cruelty. They’re doing it for profit.”
“The horses cry before they go in.”
“I hate animals.”
The neighbor turned to me. “That’s because my dog attacked him.”
Thus did two men not long out of high school pretty well recapitulate the quandary at the core of the horse slaughter debate: What is animal cruelty? Is it cruel to transport a horse hundreds of miles for the purpose of killing it? Is it cruel to kill it for the purpose of eating it? What are our obligations to horses—and are they moral or cultural? Does it make sense that it is against the law to “torture” your cat but not to kill it and eat it? If, as the record of our current war suggests, we as a nation can’t even agree on what constitutes human torture, then it’s hard to hold out much hope for a consensus on animal cruelty, a problem both thornier and less critical.
Regarding animals, “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” wrote Jeremy Bentham in 1780, responding to Immanuel Kant’s contention that man had no direct duties toward animals. It was 42 more years before mistreatment of animals first became an offense under English law. Today, though, you’d be hard-pressed to look at the practices of large factory farms—farms, for instance, where hogs are confined for the duration of their lives within narrow cages, inside fetid, manure-loaded barns—and not conclude that we as meat eaters are systematically responsible for animal suffering on an unprecedented scale, even as our stated attitudes toward animals have grown more tenderhearted. To pluck another irony out of the pot, the section of the Texas penal code defining “cruelty to animals” lists “transports or confines an animal in a cruel manner” as one of the candidate offenses—that is to say, the word “cruel” appears within the definition of “cruelty.” Apparently we’ll know cruelty when we see it.
But will we? Those in favor of keeping the plants open often argue that it would be cruel not to slaughter horses. A ban, they say, would leave tens of thousands of lame and old and unwanted horses in America’s paddocks. “You’re going to see more neglected horses than you’ve ever seen,” said Rusty Addison, of the Stephenville auction. “The gate’s going to be unlocked and their owners are going to be dumping them. They’ll get out on the highway and it’s going to cause wrecks. It’s going to hurt people.”
I heard it more than once: If a ban is enacted, we will see legions of gimpy horses hobbling down our thoroughfares, getting struck by cars—a grim Black-Beauty-meets-Frogger scenario. While other slaughter proponents stopped short of predicting a total hippocalypse, they still held out slaughter as the lesser evil. The American Association of Equine Practitioners (i.e., horse vets) opposed the House bill on the grounds that many horses would be left uncared for under a ban. “If they stop the horse slaughter, you’re going to see horses that were in real good health—lots and lots of them will get poor,” says Trent Ward, a buyer for the Beltex plant who lives in Kaufman. “Now that’s inhumane. When they get that way, who’s going to feed them? Where are these horses going to be at? Willie Nelson gonna feed them? There’s truckload after truckload, you know what I mean?”
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