http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=264975
Horse lobby presses for slaughter ban

Cruelty Cited; Horses flood into Canada after U.S. practice ends

Mary Vallis, National Post Published: Saturday, January 26, 2008

The once-booming business of killing horses in the United States died last year after court cases effectively shut down the country's last three abattoirs.

Thousands of unwanted horses are now crossing the border into Canada, where six federally licensed horse-slaughter plants cut and process the animals.

Most of the meat is then sent to Europe and Japan, where horse sashimi is considered a delicacy.

Activists are now lobbying for a national ban on the practice in Canada.

It is a tense issue. The activists, supported by such celebrities as Bo Derek and Willie Nelson, say they have the interests of horse lovers and gentle companion animals at heart.

Slaughter plant owners in Canada, on the other hand, bristle at suggestions their practices are unethical and are wary of attempts to draw the horsemeat business into the public eye.

They argue the international market for horsemeat is good business and creates valuable jobs.

"These people have a lot of money and a lot of time, and they create a lot of trouble," said Ken Piller, president of Natural Valley Meats in Saskatchewan.

"We're a plant. We just cut and process. To us, that's our job. If it's a chicken, or a turkey, or a horse, or a bison, or a cow, that's what we do."

To proponents of the slaughter ban, killing horses for meat is different than slaughtering cows for beef, partly because of people's emotional attachment to the species.

"It's a grey area where people might consider them livestock, but in actual fact, they're not livestock," says Shelley Grainger, a director with the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition.

"They're companion animals, they're support animals, they go to the Olympics. Policemen ride them to protect us," Ms. Grainger says.

"They're a symbol of nobility and so many other things that livestock just aren't."

Actress and horse enthusiast Bo Derek supports the group's call for a Canadian ban, saying Canada is long overdue in changing its animal cruelty laws.

"These same horses that we saved in one respect, a lot of them are ending up here and that only increases their suffering because the distances are further and the conditions that they are transported in are really horrendous," Ms. Derek said in Vancouver last week.

Federal statistics show that the number of horses driven across the border for slaughter jumped 37% in 2007, a surge animal activists say is directly linked to their success in shutting down the industry in the United States.

In total, 30,000 horses crossed the border last year bound for slaughter at those plants.

While the remaining horse abattoirs in the United States are closed [one in Illinois and two in Texas], another slaughterhouse could still legally open in any state that has not banned the slaughter of horses.

As a result, the Humane Society of the United States is pushing the Democratic-led Congress to pass the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, which would ban horse slaughter for human consumption nationwide.

That same legislation would also prohibit the export of horses for slaughter to Canada or Mexico.

Ed Whitfield, a Republican congressman from Kentucky who has been leading the fight for the ban in the United States, said horses taken to slaughter were stolen and taken to auction, where they were purchased by meat marketers.

"If it were not for a group of 50 or 60 killer buyers, this business wouldn't even exist," Mr. Whitfield said.

Horsemeat is a relatively small but thriving industry in Canada. While considered taboo in most of Canada, some meat is sold in Quebec.

Most of the horsemeat processed in Canada is shipped overseas, where it is considered

gourmet fare.

According to Statistics Canada, nearly $70-million worth of horsemeat was shipped to Canada's top 10 export countries in 2007, an increase of 20% over 2006. (The biggest buyers were France, Japan and Switzerland).

With a boom in the number of horses coming across the border, activists in Canada fear more plants are preparing to process the influx.

When horses reach a slaughterhouse, they are usually stunned with a captive bolt pistol that delivers a blow to the brain, and then bled to death.

Veterinarians working with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) inspect all horses delivered to slaughterhouses both before and after their deaths.

Natural Valley Farms, a beef facility in southern Saskatchewan, recovered from layoffs last year by processing horsemeat bound for the European Union.

The company now employs about 155 hourly workers.

Mr. Piller spoke reluctantly about his company's decision to process meat because he says it will bring a "flurry" of new attacks, but he stressed that his company adheres to federal guidelines.

"In Canada, trust me, there is no way in heck you could ever not do it right," he said.

Even some horse lovers recognize slaughter as a necessity. Equine Canada, the governing body for equestrian sports, released a statement yesterday saying it realizes the processing of horses "provides a humane alternative to allowing the horses to continue a life of discomfort and pain, inadequate care or abandonment."

Indeed, Dr. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, says the closure of slaughterhouses in the United States has led to the abandonment of horses, and a fate "worse than slaughter" by being shipped out of the United States.

Her primary concern is not the horses exported to Canada for slaughter, but rather the 300% increase in horses in southern states shipped to Mexico.

"My worst nightmare has happened," Dr. Grandin said. "People go, 'Ick, I don't want to eat horses.' But what they weren't thinking about were worse fates than slaughter."