When Sue Wallis, a Wyoming rancher, state representative and pro-horse slaughter crusader, was looking for a state that might be amenable to opening an equine processing facility, she and her colleagues landed on Missouri.
“Missouri rose to the top quickly because of the support we found in the state — support from the economic development people, the agriculture department and the communities, quite frankly,” she said in a recent interview. “If you draw a 500-mile circle from western Missouri you encapsulate 30 percent of the horse herd in the U.S.”
Two Missouri sites — one in Rockville and one in Mountain Grove in Texas County — fell through over the past year or so, largely because financial backers balked when they got wind of public opposition and legal tangles. But Wallis and a contingent of horse slaughter proponents eventually found Rains Natural Meats, a shuttered abattoir in Gallatin, about 75 miles north of Kansas City, that seemed prime for reinvention.
She spoke with the owners and asked if they’d consider converting the small facility into a horse slaughterhouse. They said they would.
But Wallis’ bid to reopen the first horse slaughterhouse in the country since 2007 has, in recent days, hit a few snags. Now the woman nicknamed “Slaughterhouse Sue” — who has circulated recipes for “Filly Filet” — finds her efforts stalled.
This week a judge in Cole County ordered the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to hold off issuing a waste-water permit to Rains until he can consider a lawsuit alleging that run-off from the plant could contaminate water and soil.
The lawsuit, filed by Clayton-based attorney, Stephen G. Jeffery, on behalf of horse rescue groups and a Gallatin resident, says horses are often treated with as many as 100 different types of drugs not approved for human consumption — and that these could potentially be released in the plant’s waste water.
“Our argument was basically that Rains applied for a permit that would allow them to discharge A, B and C,” Jeffery said. “But what they’re going to be discharging is A, B, C and X, Y and Z — and X,Y and Z aren’t allowed.”
Late last week a federal judge in Albuquerque, N.M., issued a ruling along similar lines. The Humane Society of the United States and other animal rights groups had sought to stop two facilities, one in New Mexico and another in Iowa, from beginning operations on Monday, saying that federal inspection permits should not have been granted because the facilities had not conducted environmental impact studies.
The judge issued a restraining order on Aug. 2, three days before the facilities were going to start slaughtering.
These temporary suspensions, both here and in Iowa and New Mexico, appear to have given anti-slaughter campaigners the edge in an emotional nationwide battle over the issue.
Congress in effect ended horse slaughter when it banned funding for inspections in 2005. The last horse slaughter facility, in De Kalb, Ill., closed in 2007. But in 2011, a group of three lawmakers, including Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., removed language from a must-pass federal spending bill that freed up the funds again. The group was criticized for the move, which it took behind closed doors and without public input.
Since then pro-slaughter advocates have pushed the agriculture department to issue inspection permits. The USDA finally did for the New Mexico and Iowa facilities earlier this summer, saying it had no choice under current law. Rains also applied for an inspection permit, but has not been granted one yet.
Since the permits were issued, the debate has heated up again, with both sides passionately entrenched in their positions.
Proponents note an uptick in the number of neglected, starving horses since the slaughter facilities closed here seven years ago, pushing down the value of horses in general.
“The horse industry has been decimated,” Wallis said. “We have worthless horses being turned out and abandoned.”
Consequently, Wallis believes, the closure of the slaughter houses has led to less humane conditions for horses, not more. “People take care of animals that have value,” she said. “It’s when they don’t that they neglect them.”
Since the facilities here closed, roughly 140,000 horses have been shipped annually to Mexico and Canada for slaughter, about the same number that were being slaughtered in the U.S. before the ban.
Wallis and others say this has endangered more horses, which now are crammed, often injured and lame, into trailers for long-haul drives. Then, once across the border, the animals are slaughtered in less humane ways, without U.S. government oversight. (Despite this position, Wallis and her colleagues pushed for overturning legislation in 2009 that would have banned shipping horses to other countries for slaughter.)
For Wallis, it’s largely an economic issue.
“Every breed registry is down 70 percent since 2007. Fewer colts are being born,” she said. “That’s 70 percent less feed being sold, 70 percent fewer jobs, 70 percent fewer veterinarians. This has wrecked communities — all because of the elitist snooty arrogance of this bunch of people telling us what’s culturally acceptable to eat.”
Some anti-slaughter advocates point out that the facilities slaughtering horses in Canada and Mexico are operated by the same European corporations that would operate them here, and adhere to the same standards, making the pro-slaughter argument on oversight invalid.
These across-the-border facilities slaughter horses in the same way – with captive bolt guns that shoot steel rods into the brain – as the American companies used to, and plan to do again.
For anti-slaughter advocates, this is largely an emotional issue — based on the notion of the horse as a noble companion and athlete that has served humans through the ages, rather than livestock bred to be eaten. Horses, they say, are by nature flighty animals, that are especially panicked and distressed by the confinement and conditions of the slaughterhouse.
“They’ve carried us into battle, they’ve been alongside us,” said Cynthia MacPherson, an attorney based in Mountain Grove who battled against the plant opening there. “This is just a lack of ethic and morals. Horses aren’t bred for human consumption. I’ve talked to people in De Kalb. They’ll tell you they heard the horses screaming all night.”
(To that Wallis responds: “Animals that are stressed — in the trade they’re called ‘dark cutters’ — their meat is ruined. The object of every plant owner is to keep the animals as calm as you can. The last thing you want is an animal all jazzed up.”)
MacPherson and other anti-slaughter advocates say that opening slaughterhouses would encourage irresponsible overbreeding and neglect by creating a market for horse flesh.
She said her law firm put up funds to euthanize and dispose of old and infirm horses in her region, but vets told her that owners don’t want someone to pay for disposal — they want cash for their horse flesh.
“We can’t encourage this irresponsible behavior,” she said. “In 2007, we turned the corner on breeding horses indiscriminately.”
Many animal-rights advocates say the debate over slaughter points out an even more complicated modern-day question, arising from the fact that we largely don’t need horses anymore: If we’re going to use horses for pleasure and breed them for racing, what do we owe them in their dotage? If we can’t agree on how horses are treated at the end of their useful lives, or are unwilling to pay for humane euthanasia and disposal, some believe the solution is to not to breed or use them at all.
But as the horse community debates the slaughter issue, those against the practice could have another victory ahead. An agriculture appropriations bill that will likely be voted on this fall would once again halt funding for inspections.
In the meantime, the owners of Rains Natural Meats say they’ll fight to overturn the judge’s ruling. But until they prevail, the current ruling will keep the slaughterhouse dark.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH