This business mostly operates under the radar. While a handful of horses are purposely sold into slaughter by irresponsible owners, most arrive at the slaughterhouse via livestock auctions, where unsuspecting owners sell the animals to slaughterhouse middlemen known as “kill buyers.” Such buyers keep a low profile as they purchase as many horses as they can from auctions around the country and haul them to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada.
The suffering of these horses begins long before they even reach the slaughterhouse. Transport conditions are appalling, with horses regularly packed into overcrowded trailers and deprived of food, water, or rest during journeys that can last more than 24 hours. Upon arrival at the slaughterhouse, the suffering continues unabated. Horses might be left for long periods in tightly packed trailers, subjected to further extremes of heat and cold. In hot weather, their thirst is acute. Downed animals are unable to rise, and horses are offloaded using excessive force.
When the horses are herded through the plant to slaughter, callous workers use fiberglass rods to poke and beat their faces, necks, backs, and legs as the animals are shoved through the facility and into the kill box. Subjected to overcrowding, deafening sounds, and the smell of blood, the horses become more and more desperate, exhibiting fearful “flight” behavior—pacing in prance-like movements with their ears pinned back against their heads and eyes wide open.
An investigation by the San Antonio News-Express chronicled the use of the puntilla knife on horses prior to slaughter in Mexican slaughter plants. Footage obtained by the paper showed horses being stabbed repeatedly in the neck with these knives. Such a barbaric practice simply paralyzes the animal. Horses may be fully conscious at the start of the slaughter process, during which they are hung by a hind leg, their throat slit, and body butchered. Death, the final betrayal of these noble animals, is protracted and excruciating.
Wild horses are also at risk of being slaughtered, particularly since a 2004 backdoor congressional rider engineered by Senator Conrad Burns (R–MT) gutted a number of the protections afforded by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Now, the Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for protecting wild horses, sells off “excess” horses (those 10 years of age or older, or not adopted after three tries), putting these animals in danger of entering into the slaughter pipeline. A 2015 Office of Inspector General investigation found that the BLM had sold almost 1,800 wild horses to a single kill buyer.
