In the East Texas hamlet of Kaufman last month, a fetid wind ruffled the stripes of the largest American flag in town. It had been a gift to the locals from executives of the pungent Dallas Crown slaughterhouse. A few blocks away, company president Michael de Beukelaar stood in City Hall for the Pledge of Allegiance, conspicuously holding his tongue. The Belgian and his foreign bosses were about to learn whether a city commission would force a shutdown of the plant, which had supplied meat to tables in Europe and Japan for more than 20 years. De Beukelaar seemed most concerned with one intractable problem: Americans don’t eat horse.
Strangely enough, Texans prefer to ride horses as opposed to eating them. When an animal is wrapped up in the mythology of Texas as tightly as the horse it, it’s a hell of a transition to go from thinking of the horse as a symbol of strength, independence, and courage to thinking of it as an entree braised with a light cream sauce and a side of asparagus.
We Americans prefer our slaughterhouses to kill beef cattle. After all, cows are held to be stupid, somnolent, barely animate objects. Horses are revered for their strength, speed, and nobility. Cows are methane producers. Horses are athletes. By our way of thinking, you just don’t eat athletes (though most of us would like to see Barry Bonds bo the way of the methane producers). This is how we Texans have managed to delude ourselves into thinking that we revere horses, not kill them. In fact, thousands of horses are slaughtered in Texas every year, with the meat going not to American tables, but to Europe, when folks don’t share our aversion to eating horse flesh.
According to the Houston Press article, 1,750 tons of horse meat was sold to US zoos last year, while another 17,000 tons went to Europe for human consumption- and a large part of that amount comes from right here in Texas.
Clad in a European-cut blazer with felt elbow patches, de Beukelaar squared off against a Texan in a Johnny Cash getup of faded black. Houstonian Jerry Finch had for years been a leader in local and national fights to shut down the country’s three horse slaughterhouses — Dallas Crown, Fort Worth-based Beltex Corporation and Cavel International of DeKalb, Illinois — which together killed 88,000 horses last year. Finch traded sharp whispers with a posse of activists. “Nobody wants to recognize horse slaughter for what it is,” he’d said earlier that day. “It’s just murder.”
The commission reached a decision late in the night, unanimously ruling to close the plant by September. An attorney for Dallas Crown pledged to take the battle to court. Finch stepped outside, lit a cigarette and cried. “We did it,” he said as a comrade embraced him. The activists ordered vegetarian pizzas and partied into the morning.
But many other equine enthusiasts around the country weren’t celebrating. Shuttering the slaughterhouses of Texas won’t help horses, they say, and it might just force them someplace worse.
There are folks out there who have taken it as there mission to stop the slaughter of horses, nationwide if possible, but certainly here in Texas. A large part of their efforts have been focused on highlighting the miserable, inhumane conditions in which these horses are kept as they unknowingly wait to be dispatched to the Great Beyond and, more than likely, a plate in a European restaurant.
The activists were filming Dallas Crown in the hope that the footage would fan public outrage over horse slaughter. If it did, it wouldn’t be the first time that the idea of eating Silver or Mr. Ed had irked the Texan temperament. A nearly forgotten state statute dating to 1949 prohibits the slaughter of horses for human consumption. In fact, the law gained new prominence in 2002 when then-attorney general John Cornyn ruled it legal. But last year U.S. District Judge Terry Means found that federal law superseded the old slaughter ban. An appeal is pending.
This hardly means that the effort to shutter horse abbatoirs in Texas (and nationwide) has gone dormant. If anything, the effort continues stronger than it ever has.
A campaign to outlaw horse slaughter last year at the federal level was bolstered by polls showing 70 to 90 percent of Americans opposed killing horses for meat. Some congressional offices received more calls in favor of a proposed U.S. slaughter ban than they did regarding the recent Supreme Court nominations or Hurricane Katrina. One Senate office, fielding a call every six minutes, begged Nancy Perry, a lobbyist with the Humane Society of the United States, to ward off the siege. “They couldn’t function,” she says.
A similar upwelling of public support pushed through a 1998 ballot measure banning horse slaughter in California. Dick Schumacher, president of the California Veterinary Medical Association at the time, attributes the move to a shift in the public perception of horses. “They are now seen less as livestock,” he says, “and more as pets.”
The concept of the food chain aside, from where I sit this is as it should be. We live in a world where domesticated pets occupy places of honor as family members. Children grow up learning to ride and care for horses, not view them as entrees best served with a light cream sauce. Regardless of the European demand for horse meat, we should not be participating in or condoing the commercial slaughter of horses. It’s been difficult to create outrage on this issue, because most Americans, and certainly most Texans remain unaware of the market for horse meat. The horse meat industry depends on this ignorance for their continued existence. With any luck, this will continue to change if we can continue to focus attention on companies like Dallas Crown.
