The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“Horses are not cattle”
With her camera in hand, Annette Butler climbed into a corral beside an old homestead near Crested Butte South and moved slowly toward a herd of 40 horses milling around in the dirt. “That’s her,” she said, pointing to a dapple-gray mare moving slowly around the edge of the group. “She’s definitely pregnant.”
Her husband, Paul, looked back at the stock trailer hitched to their pickup in the driveway and shook his head. “Maybe we’ll only be able to take three,” he said.
When the couple drove to the Gunnison Valley from their five-acre spread outside Elizabeth, in the foothills east of the Front Range, the plan had been to get four horses. But they hadn’t made the five-hour trip for a typical stock sale. This was a rescue.
“Are you going to get one?” Annette asked me. “If you don’t they’ll go to the meat market.”
Queenie, as the pregnant mare came to be called throughout Sunday morning, September 18, was one of a herd of 60 horses that “mysteriously” appeared in the pastures north of Round Mountain in June, according to Liz Currier, who immediately took an interest in the new arrivals.
When they came to the valley, each of the horses was gaunt and mangy-looking, still shedding their winter coats. “So rumors started swirling: What are these horses doing here? Who owns these horses? What in God’s name is going on?” Currier recalls.
But the answers to those questions did nothing to ease her concern; instead they ignited a passion. The truth was hard to hear.
According to Currier, “these horses, as of September 15, would be put in a trailer and driven to Mexico for slaughter,” since the practice has been effectively banned in the United States since 2007.
In a 2010 report for Congress, Tadlock Cowan, an analyst in natural resources and rural development, reported that in 2006, 105,000 horses were slaughtered at three remaining abattoirs in the U.S., mainly for export to Europe and Japan, where the meat is valued for being low in cholesterol and high in protein.
The following year, court action closed the two plants in Texas and a state ban shuttered the last horse abattoir in Illinois. Since then, horses bound for slaughter have been going to Mexico or Canada.
According to Suzanne McMillan, an attorney active in animal rights law, the horses that are shipped out of the country are often transported in cramped conditions on double-decker stock trailers designed to fit cattle.
“I don’t think people realize what the transportation of horses entails,” she says. “They get so upset about the actual slaughter, but so much more of the animals’ time is spent in a transport trailer than it is at a slaughter house.”
For McMillan, the fact that the horses are going to slaughter, however, should have little to do with how they are treated. She feels all livestock should be treated humanely until the end, whether they are horses or the cows that graze in the Gunnison Valley before going to market.
To Currier, although horses and cattle share a few traits, the two are as different as cats and dogs. She says, “I like cows, they’re cute and I eat them. But if you look in the eyes of a horse long enough, you’ll understand. The relationship man has had with horses has been from the beginning of time…
“When I drive down Highway 50 in Nevada and look at the original Pony Express route I think it was horses that linked loved ones in Missouri to loved ones in California,” she continued. “It was a horse that delivered the message, not a cow. Horses are bred for sport and companionship – not meat.”
Hearing from the ranch owner, Bob Niccoli, that the horses grazing in his pastures were only on their way from a bad situation into a worse one was enough to spur Currier into action. She thought, “‘I might be able to find a home for one or two of these horses.’”
At home, Currier wrote a two-paragraph email about the fate of the herd and sent it to a few fellow horse lovers, who then sent it to friends of their own. A couple of hours later, she heard from a woman in Evergreen, Colo. who was interested in paying the $400 price Niccoli had quoted for one of the horses. Within 48 hours, she had gotten responses from Japan, Hawaii and Buenos Aires, all from people looking for ways to help.
With momentum building behind her push to save the horses, Currier asked Niccoli if there might be a lot-price for the herd. The horses were $400 a head. A second email sent to friends was more explicit and within a couple of days people from around the globe had donated enough money to save the 60 horses.
To accommodate the flow of money and horses, Currier set up Crested Butte Horse Rescue LLC, with eight Crested Butte-area women forming the board of directors and a handful of volunteers willing to help in any way they could.
Last week, the group placed fourteen more horses in homes on the Front Range. And the Butlers, after the rain had cleared, took four last Sunday, hoping one would make a good riding horse to join the four Missouri Foxtrotters they already have.
According to Annette, several of the horses in the herd show the traits of gaited breeds, like Foxtrotters and Tennessee Walkers. Others, she thought, had the look of Morgan horses. All of them had brands and geldings were mixed in with the group, indicating someone had reared the horses at one point.
“These are domestic horses, we just don’t know where they came from,” Currier says. “They are not Mustangs or wild horses and if you turned them out in the wild they wouldn’t know how to forage for food or survive.”
Even in a pasture, surrounded by green grass, a few in the herd still had ribs showing. Another’s face was covered in ringworm and a dark, leggy bay with the number 208 branded on his back was covered in welts.
One horse was so malnourished and sickly it had to be euthanized. But the future for the others is looking bright.
Equine veterinarian Alicia Grossman DVM, who serves on the Crested Butte Horse Rescue board or directors, says the dozens of horses that were adopted but not placed should all come around with a little care.
But the future for unwanted horses in the United States is far less certain. McMillan says there’s a large network of horse rescue organizations across the country, but “the problem is they’re all overrun.” Elsewhere, she says, horses are being left to roam on public land.
And while a piecemeal system of slaughter bans has put the brakes on the practice of killing horses for profit domestically, there’s still no federal law banning horse slaughter, McMillan says, adding “Some states are looking at opening their own slaughter houses. There’s nothing to stop them.”
In the current session of Congress, bills are working their way through the legislature that would “make it a crime to knowingly possess, ship, transport, sell, deliver, or receive any horse, carcass, or horse flesh intended for human consumption.” But similar bills in the past, some recently, have failed to pass through both houses of Congress.
And Currier says, “Although it might be a sickening and sad thought, I think we ought to revisit the idea of reintroducing horse slaughter in the United States; it’s the only way for people who can’t take care of their horses.” To her, having a horse humanely killed under strict regulations in the United States is better than shipping the animals off to an unknown fate across the border, or having them slowly starve to death, abandoned in a field.
And lobbying in Washington, she says, to make the realities of horse ownership more humane is in the future. First, however, she has a herd of nearly 40 horses that need homes. Until then they’ll need a lot of hay and a little bit of handling.
It’s a huge task that was made easier when Bill and Katherine Lacy offered to put what remained of the herd on land near Red Mountain. As their son Trey came with a huge 35-foot stock trailer, Sam Smith and Hillary Sherwood wrangled the horses into a holding pen.
As the gate came open the first horses shot into the opening, but as the trailer filled those in the rear hesitated. Little did they know what lay ahead was better than what might have been.
If you’d like to adopt a horse or would like more information about how you can help, email [email protected]. Donations to the rescue can be made through horsefoodbank.org when you click on the ‘Donate’ tab.
To those who have already offered assistance, Currier adds, “The Crested Butte Horse Rescue would also like to recognize and thank the many horse lovers in Gunnison Valley, who, over the course of the summer quietly adopted, saved and invited horses from this herd into their lives. They saw the beauty in a skinny, scrappy starving young horse and stepped in to help. These individual efforts were the source of inspiration that powered the larger adoption mission”
