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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Those who want slaughter abolished, meanwhile, maintain that horses that would have otherwise gone to the U.S. plants will be absorbed after a ban, given that the number slaughtered represents a tiny percentage of the total U.S. horse population of 9.2 million. They point to the fact that the number of horses processed per year has declined from 342,877 in 1989 to 91,757 in 2005, without any corresponding rise in abuse cases, and have produced a detailed analysis of the consequences of a temporary shutdown at the Illinois plant during 2002 and 2003. There was no corresponding increase in abuse of Illinois horses, the study found, nor in the export of horses to be slaughtered elsewhere.
That argument would not have had much traction at the American Legion hall just down the road from Dallas Crown. I stopped in a little after five on a Friday to find the weekend well under way. At the bar, several men spoke adamantly in favor of horse slaughter. The horses at the plant were ones whose time had come, they said. Ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of them “need to be there,” said a man who used to work at Dallas Crown, unloading horses. “I seen it firsthand. I don’t understand all this hoopla.”
A loud guy cut in. “What are you going to do with the zoos once you cut all the horse meat off? So are we going to just close all our zoos down? That’s what it’ll do.”
“There’s a big difference between people raised in the city and people raised in the country,” said a tall bearded man at the end of the bar. “Country people understand how things work.”
“One thing is for sure,” interjected the man who’d worked at the plant. “Through your life you’ll meet a lot more horse’s asses than horses.”
The loud guy moved closer to me but continued to shout, as if I were standing some distance away in a strong wind: “People that love animals are the ones that kill horses and dogs and cats and anything else, not all these other bullshit people!”
“NO DOGS, NO ALCOHOL” said the signs at the Stephenville auction, and in the auditorium I saw strictly barn cats and sodas, the latter in the grips of fleshy gentlemen with walrus mustaches. To walk into that room, with its Carter-era television monitors set on a ledge above the auctioneer’s booth and the Cowboy Ten Commandments (“6. No foolin’ around with another feller’s gal”) posted up on the wall along with the ads for septic plumbing and propane, was to step backward in time. Even the sallow lighting seemed imported from the past. Not to mention the fact that the auction started with mules and donkeys at six o’clock and wouldn’t end until after midnight: In this age of multitasking and general attention deficit, the notion of sitting and watching horses run through a ring for six hours straight seemed downright premodern.
Rusty Addison sat above the ring, his mouth low to his microphone, and called out in that nasal ostinato that is its own sort of folk chant. With so many animals to run through, he moved at a steady clip. A horse was brought out from the back into the fenced half-moon of dirt, Addison announced what was known about it, and Jim Bob Thomas, standing inside the ring, shouted out a base price, often slicing his arm through the air as he called it. Men with long paddles prodded the horse to the far side and shut a gate that divided the ring so that they could bring the next horse in and push the first one out at the same time. A horse was usually on its way off before the bidding on it was done.
For all that Thomas had explained about how to size them up, the horses started to blur together before my eyes. And though I’d read on an animal activist Web site that the auction situation is itself cruel—in the way that the horses are confined in pens with other horses they don’t know and prodded with paddles—I couldn’t determine much about the horses’ emotional states, other than that there was a certain prick of tension in the dusty air, what with the horses being hurried through and the gate clanging open and shut and Thomas setting them in with his sharp cries. In the ring with Thomas were the killer buyers: Trent Ward and his father, I. W. Ward, a buyer for Dallas Crown. Trent had told me that his father had taught him everything he knew about the business. The two of them stood several feet away from each other—the son a younger and sharper copy of the father—and stared nonchalantly into space, bidding on horses with subtle little waves or flicks of the wrist. By the end of the night, each Ward would buy more than thirty horses to send to the plants.
Clustered in the seats around me were old-coot traders, girls with giant rodeo belt buckles, weekend hobbyists with little children in tow, and a lone anti-slaughter activist from Germany who nearly refused to talk to me after she saw me speaking with a killer buyer. I turned to my right and to my surprise saw Jimmy Fowler, the man whose horses I’d seen rescued a few weeks earlier. (Those horses had since been delivered to Willie Nelson’s ranch in Spicewood.) At midnight, after the sale had finished, I approached him and asked him what he’d bought. A bunch of yearlings and two-year-olds, he said. He hoped to see them put on some weight and then resell them.
And if he couldn’t? I asked.
“We don’t go to killers,” he said.
“But what are you going to do with them?”
“I either buy mares or colts, and if I can’t sell a mare, I breed her and then turn her out in the pasture. Then I’ll keep breeding her more,” he said. “I had a lot more that day than what you seen.”
He then said that while he didn’t like to send his horses to the plants, he didn’t believe the government should shut them down. “That’s a communist state,” he said.
“That’s right,” another man said.
“That’s communism. If you paid good American cash money, you ought to be able to sell it to the highest bidder.”
Already it had struck me that, as with most political sentiment, peoples’ attitudes toward horse slaughter had more to do with where they were from and how they were raised than with any inside information or judicious weighing of the argument. Even more than that, their attitudes were rooted in instinct, in a gut sense they had of horses and what was best for them.
It was the middle of the night, and I stumbled out of the sale barn, dead tired, the sounds of the auction still thrumming in my ears. The trailers had all lined up again. The moon was full. A small purple sedan with feed bags in the backseat pulled alongside me, and the activist from Germany opened the door. Sitting under the dome light, she told me of months of “undercover” work monitoring auctions, of how she was never going to give up, of how it was a shame people couldn’t see all this from a horse’s point of view.
She told me to call her later for more information, but I knew that I wouldn’t. By then I knew that it wasn’t information that I lacked; it was a certain kind of horse sense.
THE CLOSEST I EVER CAME to horse slaughter itself was to stand on the plot of land behind the Dallas Crown facility and listen. The plant backs right up on Boggy Bottom, a neighborhood that at one time was also known to some as “colored town,” and Robert Eldridge, a lifelong resident of Boggy Bottom, leads a kind of tour there. He took me around the perimeter of the plant and described the foul smells that keep him from going outside his house sometimes, the manure smell and the urine smell and the warm smell of carnage. Regardless of what you think about horse slaughter, he said, a packinghouse doesn’t belong in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood.
We paused directly behind the kill area. It was walled and fenced off, but we were standing on a rise and could see over the fence. There was a little hole in the wall, where pipes emerged from the building. Occasionally we saw a flash of blue uniform moving by the aperture.
And this is what we hear: Quiet. The latching or unlatching of a door. The door shuts. A horse blows through its nostrils. A rumble—maybe a chain being dragged across the floor. A sound like hooves on a metal surface. After a while someone mutters in Spanish, but we’re too far away to make out the words. A creaking, and then an unremarkable mechanical sound, like a shotgun being pumped.
“That’s it,” says Eldridge.
We hear the dragging of a chain again. Thirty or so feet farther down, a conveyor belt extends out at a diagonal from the plant, ending just above a truck. A little while later, we see a hide emerge onto the belt and be carried up to the top. It’s a mass of black and red, with a dark clotted mane, that hangs there for a moment at the top of the belt, before dropping into the hide truck like some damp, discarded costume.
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