“Their brains are similar to pigs and cattle,” she said, “although they’re a bit more flighty. As long as you use the right equipment, it can be as humane as any other kind of slaughter. I don’t see any reason why a horse can’t lead a happy life and be slaughtered and not suffer.” The vast majority of welfare issues Dr. Grandin witnesses aren’t due to slaughter but to owner neglect. If given the choice between being a horse and a commodity pig or chicken, Dr. Grandin says, “I’d rather be the average horse.”
Perhaps the activists’ real issue with horsemeat is that that it comes from animals with fuzzy ears and the long, soft noses that gobble carrots right out of your hand. Horses have names. Horses win thrilling races, give Olympic medal performances and pull hay wagons loaded with school children. As one activist put it at a recent protest, people shouldn’t eat horses because they are “companion animals.”
The activists are correct about one thing. The majority of horses aren’t raised for the table. Only a small number – somewhere between 1 and 10 per cent – are born and raised expressly for human consumption. The others only become meat if and when their usefulness to humans has expired.
Yet this simple fact of horses’ existence makes slaughtering them imperative. When they’re too old to go on trail rides or too slow to win races, they may still live for another 10 or 15 years. Keeping horses requires land and money. The odd wealthy hobby farmer may be willing to support a horse through its golden years. But most owners just don’t have the money.
For proof, look south of the border, where the slaughter has been banned. The last plant closed in 2007 and in the intervening years, Americans have discovered an unintended consequence: unwanted horses.
All over the United States, owners find themselves with horses they can no longer care for. Horses that can still fetch a decent price – about $200 (U.S.) – must endure a long journey to a Canadian or, more likely, a Mexican abattoir (where animal treatment standards can leave much to be desired).
Those are the lucky ones. Throughout the United States, skinny, neglected horses are being turned loose on public land or abandoned in the dead of night at auction barns. In Nebraska alone last year, more than 300 neglected or abandoned horses were seized, some of which had to be euthanized.
“It got worse as soon as they closed the slaughter plants,” says Bob Hester, a deputy sheriff in Fillmore County, Neb. “It used to be people could take a horse to a sale barn and get $50 or $100 for it. Now it’s costing them. So what do they do? They take it some place and dump it.”
“All these regulations have done nothing to help the horse,” says Devin Mullet, a livestock seller and self-described horse lover from Kalona, Iowa, who had to install cameras at his sale barn to stop people from dumping horses in the middle of the night. “They’ve just ended up making it worse,” he says.
Canada has three choices. We can shut down the horse slaughter, in which case we will quickly find ourselves with more horses than we can feed. We can continue to slaughter horses and send most of the meat to other parts of the world. Or people across the country can try the meat Québécois know as chevaline.
One anglophone who cooks chevaline is Matthew DeMille, a chef at a Toronto restaurant called Parts and Labour that specializes in unusual animal parts such as bone marrow, ox tongue and pig’s ear.
