Meat on the hoof?
New legislation provides 'window of opportunity' for horse slaughter
By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau
CHINLE, Dec. 16, 2011
(Special to the Times - Donovan Quintero)
A Rottweiler pup looks up from its feast on a dead horse Dec. 5 in Iyanbito, N.M. An estimated 60,000 feral horses roam the Navajo Nation, in danger of starving to death or being hit by cars and becoming food for feral dogs. A recent change in federal law could open the door for a horse slaughtering plant on the Navajo Nation.
"There's a horse in my freezer right now," declared the Many Farms Chapter grazing official and long-time advocate of a horse slaughtering plant on the Navajo Nation.
Old-time Navajos believed eating dried horse meat in the winter warded off colds and flu, and Tso thinks they were onto something.
"To us, traditionally, it's medicine," he said.
A clause in a federal appropriations bill passed by Congress last month rescinds language in the 2005 Agricultural Appropriations Act that de-funded federal inspection of horse meat, effectively shutting down the American horse-packing industry.
On the Navajo Nation, where excess feral horses used to be shipped to slaughterhouses in neighboring states and now must be trucked all the way to Mexico, it has meant a proliferation of wild equines. The BIA estimates about 60,000 unclaimed horses roam the reservation, consuming forage already thin from a decade of drought.
Tso thinks the new legislation creates "a window of opportunity we need to jump on."
He has already approached his chapter about it, and thinks it's time to take the discussion to Council.
Meanwhile, however, the animal rights contingent that closed down the horse-packing industry in 2005 is poised to do it again.
"There's already been a bill introduced that would get the de-fund language back in," said Chris Heyde, deputy director of government and legal affairs for the Animal Welfare Institute. "In the long run, we're working on a federal ban on slaughtering horses."
Heyde said slaughtering horses is different from slaughtering cattle and other animals that have traditionally been used for meat.
"It has to do with how they're developed as a species," he said. "Behaviorally and physically, cattle are bred for the conditions of a slaughterhouse. Horses are not. And if you have wild horses on your reservation that have never interacted with people, that's a thousand times worse.
"The trauma of rounding them up, packing them in a truck, and unloading them on a blood-spattered kill floor where someone is going to hit them over the head is almost unimaginable," he said.
But is it any more cruel than letting them starve to death, which many Navajo horses do?
"They're wild animals," Heyde said. "Wild animals die."
Tso says he's heard the animal rights groups' arguments, but he has yet to see one of their members in Many Farms.
"I would tell them, 'Come out here,'" he said. "Let me show them the emaciated horses, the dead horses on the roadside that have been hit by cars. If they have a solution, I'd like to hear it. I haven't heard it yet."
Heyde argues packing horse meat doesn't even make good business sense, because the domestic demand is low and it's hard to find horses that have not, at some point, been given drugs that are not cleared for human consumption.
But most of the Navajo feral horses have never been injected with anything, and Tso believes there are enough wild horses on nearby reservations and federal lands to feed the overseas and domestic demand for quite a while.
And he'd like to see Navajos start eating horse again.
"We'd be healthier," he asserted.
He's not afraid of Heyde's threats to reinstitute the slaughter ban.
"It's a good test of our status as a sovereign nation," he said, and he thinks he can line up other tribes behind the effort.
"I've visited with the San Carlos Apaches," he said. "They have a terrible time with people dumping horses on their rez."
At the moment, horses are such a losing proposition, people are abandoning them in droves. The price of one hay bale has risen to about $20, Tso said - about four times what an untrained feral horse is fetching at auction.
And yet, there's something about slaughtering them that makes even some business-minded Navajos wrinkle their noses.
Jennifer Gillson, a member of the steering committee of the Navajo Chamber of Commerce, seemed saddened by the thought of a horse-packing plant on Navajo.
"I'm not a good one to ask," she said. "I love horses. To me, horses are a gift of labor, transportation and sports."
She agrees that there are too many of them for the arid Navajo landscape to support, but she's not sure a slaughterhouse is the answer.
"When you're in business, it has to be a passion, or it doesn't work," she said. "Frankly, I can't think of too many Navajos who would have a passion for killing horses."