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United Horsemen is a 501(c)(3) educational and charitable organization with a plan for humane and realistic solutions to the excess horse problem. Two parts of the mission embraced by these dedicated urban and rural horse-lovers is the rescue and rehabilitation of horses with potential for re-training and re-homing. The third element involves recycling: the blunt term is slaughter, but the goal is euthanasia or humane death by captive bolt or bullet at a local, US-regulated facility.

Part of the success of this rescue, rehabilitation and recycle project depends on Dr. Temple Grandin, who was asked to design the horse-handling chute for the proposed Wyoming facility. She is an animal behaviorist and professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, author, and one of Time Magazine’s Most Infuential People of 2010.

Dr. Grandin, who is autistic with a special connection and empathy for animals, described the fate of horses shipped to Mexico where they are stabbed to sever their spines as her “worst nightmare and an example of well-intentioned but very bad unintended consequences. It’s only going to get worse because there’s no way to close that border. They just wave you through. I pulled some fgures off the internet and something like 1200 horses a week are crossing the border from the US. The plant is under the European Union, which is getting very concerned about the drug residue problem.”

In other words, if the EU shuts down or reduces production in that plant, then horses from the US will go into local livestock plants and ‘neighborhood’ butcher shops and that will be even worse for the horses, due to no regulation of Mexican abattoirs. “It will be an unregulated mess,” emphasized Dr. Grandin, “and nobody can go down there and inspect anything, because it’s too dangerous.”

The growing horrors in Mexico add more weight to why a change in US laws to allow a humane horse-processing facility in Wyoming would save many thousands of horses from suffering on the road to Mexico and the ultimate indignity of a merciless demise. The horses would beneft from the federal transport laws, the facility would be regulated and managed properly. Most of all, the animals would handled with care. Moreover, the public eye would be watching to make sure that the horses were handled properly and that the humane code would be upheld to the best of everyone’s ability.

“I have the design,” says Dr. Grandin. “Once you have that in place, you want the horses to have quiet and careful handling outside, no distractions, and you have to have management that wants to handle animals right. If you don’t have management dedicated to doing things right, you’re going to have bad stuff going on.”

United Horsemen are committed to alleviating as much suffering as possible if horses must be slaughtered, which is why they contacted Dr. Grandin. Her many years of substantial experience as an animal behaviorist has led her to pioneer humane handling and appropriate facilities for livestock to be slaughtered here in the US and around the world. Animal rights organizations don’t agree, and the general public seem to be turning a very blind eye toward the transport of horses to Mexico – out of sight, out of mind.

“If people tell me slaughter is terrible, I tell them give me all your ideas for alternatives,” says Dr. Grandin. “I’ve had people tell me what the horse rescue places are doing, some people want to make big sanctuaries. I say, ‘Fine – do it.’ Those rescue places take money. If you have a big sanctuary, they get flled up and if you exceed the capacity of the land you’ve got a real mess. I don’t want to hear should this or should that. Let’s talk about something that someone’s actually going to do.”

There’s an old saying: if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. The great efforts by individuals and small organizations to rescue and rehabilitate neglected and abandoned animals simply aren’t enough. The loss of US horse-processing plants resulted in a cruel blow to the horses themselves. “I want to talk about doing. Not policy. Not ideology. What can we actually do?” asks Dr. Grandin. “When they contact me with their lovely hate emails, I say give me plans for alternatives that are real services. What service are you going to provide? They never reply.”

We all love our horses. Nobody wants to see any animal suffer or starve or be relegated to cross the rainbow bridge at a slaughterhouse – anywhere. Yet, the realities faced by the growing numbers of unwanted horses demand that we consider all the options. For some horses, there is no escaping the abattoir. Given that fact, we might consider that our ultimate kindness, even if it’s not the most preferable option, would be to monitor the work of a humanely run processing plant here in the US than to allow horses either to starve to death or to suffer that one-way ride to Mexico.

The fact is that many horses still face death somewhere, and that means we must do what we can to make sure it is as gentle and easy as possible. We all have a conscience. If emotion over-rules common sense, however, we must be prepared to pay the consequences: living with the knowledge that we allowed doomed horses to cross the border where humane regulations simply do not exist.

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