No Easy Answers in the Battle Against Horse Slaughter

I’ve never actually wanted to win the lottery until recently. Yeah, I joke about it, but the truth is, I have this “thing” about me where I’m so hung up on doing everything all by myself. I changed my mind recently when Powerball reached $245 million and I decided that was exactly the amount of money I’d need to launch a nationwide campaign to educate people about the evils of over-breeding horses. TV, print, Internet . . . we’d blitz the country with information that seldom makes it out to the general population, and then maybe we could make a dent in the huge numbers of horses being bred and going to slaughter.

And then, of course, three rich men from Greenwich won the Lotto, taking home $104 million. They quickly devised a way to protect it, then camouflaged their actions behind a paltry $1 million gift to veterans’ organizations . . . but my bitterness causes me to digress. Because today I want to talk about why it’s so darned hard to get a grip on the horse slaughter problem, and identify some of the many hidden causes.

When we started rescuing horses 10 year ago we specialized in PMU foals. PMU stands for Pregnant Mare Urine, which is used to manufacture the drugs Premarin and Prempro. Urine is collected from pregnant mares and turned into hormone replacement drugs (seriously, folks, you are taking pills made from horse pee – have you ever experienced horse pee?) The tragic byproducts of this industry are the foals, which are sold to slaughter as soon as they are weaned from their mothers.

About five years ago we sent a trailer to North Dakota for a load of 10 foals. We’d bought them from a PMU rancher who’d been cut from the program along with hundreds of others. At that point the industry had changed dramatically when a study showed that women on Prempro were dying at alarmingly high rates from heart disease, strokes and breast cancer, so Wyeth Ayerst, the pharmaceutical company that makes these drugs, quickly released more than half of the PMU ranchers from their contracts. This dumped about 25,000 pregnant mares and thousands of foals onto the market, most of which went to slaughter. The North Dakota rancher explained to me that he’d already bred his mares before he learned he’d lost his contract. Doh!

The driver whom we sent to pick up these foals said he’d never seen a place with so many horses in his life – hundreds and hundreds of them, spread out over several hundred acres. I was discouraged by the thought because the rancher had said he couldn’t afford to feed them and that he had no choice but to send them to slaughter before winter.

We adopted out eight of the babies and kept Suzy Q and Viola, two very beautiful mares who are now working as lesson ponies, and I put the North Dakota rancher out of my mind.

The following summer, I got a call from this rancher who said he had lots and lots more foals to place.

“You bred your mares again?” I replied, flabbergasted.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “How many you want this time?”

I was speechless, for a moment, and then I told him I was in the rescue business, not resale. I had only taken horses the previous year because I was under the false assumption he was getting rid of his “inventory” and was getting out of the business. I was not going to support his continued breeding, and that was the end of it.

A few months later I learned that a West Coast rescue had taken on his horses, hundreds of them, and was working to place them as foals from a “former PMU rancher.” Waaay former. The rescue didn’t mention the rancher had been cut from the program two years earlier and had no business breeding again when he had no market for the animals he already had. The following year they did the same, both the rescue and the rancher, and I asked the rescue why. They replied that if they didn’t help, he would send them to slaughter. Wow. So at this point, a legitimate rescue that had been in the business for a decade was being held hostage by a pretend “PMU” breeder who threatened to have all the horses killed if the rescue didn’t help. And here I was thinking he was some dumb rancher, but really, he’s a marketing genius.

Yesterday I got the annual appeal from this same rescue explaining how this North Dakota “former PMU rancher” has hundreds horses to “adopt” out, many of them foals, most of the mares bred. Doh! The rancher, of course, says they’ll go to slaughter if they don’t get placed at a minimum of $1,000 “adoption” fee; I bought mine from him for $300 each, which tells me that extortion is alive and well in the United states of America.

Five years later, this rescue is still acting as a broker for this guy. The women who run the rescue live hand to mouth, begging for hay money so they can help support some rancher who refuses to find another way to support himself. Meanwhile, there are thousand of horses out there in real need and this rescue is distracted from their original purpose. At this point, they are actually encouraging a rancher to breed hundreds of horses each year, and the only solution is to say NO! Do I want these horses to go to slaughter? Absolutely not! They are beautiful and nicely bred, but so are most of the more than 100,000 others going to slaughter each year. But if this jerk won’t stop, and continues to play on the sentiments of well-intentioned people, what other choice is there? The vicious circle makes my head want to explode . . .

My goal isn’t to be depressing, but rather, to illustrate how deep this problem runs. Does bringing back slaughterhouses to this country solve the situation? Not at all. It’s a superficial and poor solution to very deep and multidimensional problem that only education can address, in the same way education is the solution for the overpopulation of dogs and cats. There is no reason why we can’t start now! 

Of course, those of us who do horse rescue are too poor to run an ad during the Super Bowl (wouldn’t that be amazing?) because we spend all our money on fencing, hay and vet bills, and apparently I’m not rich enough to win Powerball (who knew?)  So it’s up to us worker bees to do it all from the ground floor, grass-roots style. And while I do have this “thing” about me that makes me want to do everything all by myself, stopping the over breeding of horses to stop their slaughter is something that will take millions of us to manifest.