Good news! First, the...
...BACKGROUND OF THE STORY
As you may remember, Happy Trails and Frog Pond Draft Horse Rescue combined efforts last May (2008) to rescue a large group of horses (25 to be exact), mostly draft horses, from the Sugarcreek Auction, the second largest horse-slaughter and horse-meat-buyer auction east of the Mississippi. Tom Meyer, Investigative Reporter for Channel 3 WKYC, followed our efforts and filmed the events of our day.
Our goal was several fold:
1) to bring awareness to the fact that even though horse slaughter was banned here in the United States, meat buyers continue to purchase our domestic horses and send them on horrific journeys to both Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses. I watched as "meat horses" were packed into the meat trucks, unable to barely move. Often sick or injured horses go down in the trucks, unable to stand for the three day journey to the slaughterhouses without food or water. They are trampled to death enroute. For those that survive the trip, the Mexican slaughterhouses are un-regulated, and the way the horses are killed are brutal and inhumane. This hideous form of animal cruelty needed to be brought to the public's attention.
2) to bring awareness to the cruel and inhumane treatment that the horses endure while they are at this meat auction. I watched as horses were herded in groups down the narrow auction aisles, and witnessed one after another lose their footing and fall on the slippery concrete as they were scared into the holding pens. I watched as one big Belgian that I had just purchased was driven down the aisle and as he slipped on the concrete, his front legs went out from under him and got stuck underneath a gate, and as other horses nearly trampled him to death, workers tried to pull the 1,800 lb. horse by his mane and tail to free him. Having no luck with freeing the scared draft horse, I watched Leroy Baker, the auction's owner, drive a skidsteer over to try to lift the gate off the struggling horse. I was completely amazed that they didn't break his legs. I observed entire pens of sick yearlings, horses suffering from severe malnutrition, and quiet horses being kicked and bitten by bigger, more aggressive horses. Horses were packed in pens so tightly that there was barely room enough for them to move in some cases.
UPDATE — THE GOOD NEWS!
After years of getting away with heart-wrenching story-after-story of animal cruelty, the USDA has now fined Leroy Baker $162,800 for violations of animal safety regulations, and the cruelty that goes on behind the doors of the Sugarcreek Auction and inside their meat-trucks has been addressed.
Be sure to not only read the newspaper article, but on the right of your screen, you can view the television news coverage video with Tom Meyer. Most of the footage shown is from the Happy Trails/Frog Pond rescue on May 9th, 2008. As the camera pans the crowd, you can see me and Lisa sitting in the stands where we were bidding on the horses.
HORSE BREEDING
There are approximately between two-and-three hundred horses that go through the Sugarcreek Auction alone every Friday, and nearly 97% of them go to the meat-buyers. This is but one horse auction that we are addressing because it is one of the largest. Meat-buyers are at nearly every horse auction in Ohio every week, from the Mt. Hope Auction to the Kidron Auction to the Middlefield Auction to the Bloomfield Auction and every auction in between. PLEASE, help encourage your neighbors, friends and relatives to quite breeding horses "for fun". There are not enough homes in the world to take in all the unwanted horses in the United States. The horse market is down, and people call Happy Trails daily wanting to donate everything from their family's pet horse to an entire herd of horses that they can no longer afford to keep. The horse starvation cases that we receive on a regular basis are truly heart-breaking. And the majority of the herds of starving horses are owned by people who have stallions and had grand delusions of getting rich by breeding backyard horses. If you know of anyone who breeds, please give them the address of the Sugarcreek Auction and encourage them to go down there on any Friday morning to witness for themselves what the unwanted horses go through. Make sure that they stay until the end to watch them — old, young, sick, injured and blind — being packed into overcrowded meat trucks. May sure that they have some hay with them to hand to the ones who appear almost too weak to stand up — the ones that will probably go down during the transport and be trampled to death in the trailer. Be sure to have them change their clothes and disinfect their shoes when they get home so they don't bring back Strangles, which is prevalent at the auction. And take along some tissues for them — you can't leave this auction with a tear in your eye.
And finally, please pass this along. Our horses deserve our care and compassion.
