The shady trade in American horsemeat

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Ken Terpenning of Lexington, Kentucky has owned over two-dozen racehorses. But one in particular made a big impression.

“Silky Shark was everything you’d want in a racehorse,” says Terpenning. “He was vibrant, fiery, a very happy horse. On the racetrack, he was a total professional. He earned over $100,000.”

Like any athlete, there was an arc to Silky Shark’s career. But the downward slope was faster than Terpenning could have imagined. The horse had some medical problems that led to lost races, and then Terpenning fell on tough times financially. Terpenning sold the horse to a man he trusted, who continued to race him. But after a stretch of unsuccessful races, it didn’t take long for Silky Shark to wind up in the “slaughter pipeline.”

There are roughly nine million horses in the United States, and every year, people — mostly non-Americans — eat over 100,000 of them. When the U.S. banned horse slaughter five years ago, the trade didn’t stop. Horse buyers merely turned their trucks north and south to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. From there, most of the meat goes to the European Union.

If you’re an American, odds are you disapprove of horse slaughter. But whatever your ethical perspective on eating horses, there are undeniable problems with American horsemeat: the trade route from the U.S. to the EU is riddled with falsified documents, shoddy record-keeping, lax enforcement and meat tainted with drugs people should never consume.

For the past two months we’ve been investigating the shady trade in American horsemeat. Here’s what we’ve found out.

First across the finish line...

In fact, the term “slaughter pipeline” is a misnomer — it gives the impression of a uniform line of horses marching toward the slaughterhouse. In reality, it’s a haphazard and disjunctive affair with no clear starting point, but one definite outcome.

Take a horse like Silky Shark: successful and loved. The health problems that ended his racing career were not life-threatening and he could have led a long life as a field horse. But multiple sales — auction after auction — devalued Silky Shark on paper. By the time he was purchased by a “kill buyer,” the horse that won over 100 grand was probably worth about 100 bucks. A “kill buyer” is what you might imagine: they specialize in buying off the cheapest horses at auctions, then selling them for slaughter. (For a gripping look at how these auctions work, read Lisa Couturier’s “Dark Horse” from Orion. Or for disturbing tales straight from the horse’s mouth, watch “Confessions of a Horse Slaughter Kill Buyer.”)

This all makes cold business sense in racing, where an un-winning horse literally has no value. But you may be surprised to learn that field horses — pets, essentially — are picked off at auctions too. The pony your child rides at the summer carnival? Sometimes it’s cheaper to sell that horse to a kill buyer than it is to feed it through the winter.

More surprising still is where these American horses are slaughtered: Canada and Mexico. Why not slaughter them in the U.S.? Because Congress effectively banned slaughter in this country five years ago, primarily because, as mentioned above, we are not a culture that eats horses, nor do we generally approve of horse slaughter.

What that has resulted in is that more American horses were slaughtered by our neighbors in 2011 than in the U.S. a decade earlier. And, to the dismay of horse lovers, a 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office found that horses destined for slaughter now travel farther and under more stressful conditions — more time in a cramped trailer, less water to drink and food to eat — than ever before. Banning horse slaughter in the U.S., in other words, has had the peculiar effect of ensuring just as many American horses are slaughtered, only under less humane conditions.

When horse slaughterhouses closed in the U.S. five years ago, kill buyers diverted the country’s cheapest horses to Canadian and Mexican slaughterho...