Animal Guardian - Additional Feature

Never Give Up

Lessons from small-town Texas

At first glance the city of Kaufman, Texas appears a relatively idyllic place. Less than an hour outside of Dallas, the town is nestled in the rolling savannah dotted with grand old oaks and wildflowers. A two-lane highway leads gently into town. There is a simple beauty to this hamlet of 7,000, a true small-town feeling.

But roll down your windows and you’ll likely be hit with an incongruous smell - the scent of death. Kaufman plays unwilling host to Dallas Crown, Inc., one of three foreign-owned horse slaughter plants operating in the U.S. Together the three facilities butchered more than 90,000 American horses last year. The victims are former race horses, workhorses, wild horses and family pets who arrive at the plants on the trucks of the “killer buyers,” middle men who frequent livestock auctions around the country and buy horses from often unsuspecting owners for resale to the slaughterhouses. The very great majority of these horses are young and healthy and virtually all have known human companionship, making their sudden treatment as common livestock and final journey to the kill chute all the more horrific.

Public opposition to the industry is growing though, as evidenced by recent Congressional attention to the issue via a number of successful amendments designed to temporarily halt the slaughter, as well as increasing Congressional support for passage of the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (H.R. 503/S. 1915). The bill would permanently end the slaughter of our horses for human consumption overseas and has gathered steam in tandem with the growing realization that America’s horses are falling victim to this wholly un-American business.

Click here to read the entire article. This article appears in the Fall 2006 issue of Animal Guardian.